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These four couplets, culled from what is perhaps already the most elegantly selective poem we have inherited from early modern England, epitomize several of the qualities of mind for which Andrew Marvell is properly admired and remembered: precision, economy, control (over a considerable sensuality), a final eccentric solitariness. But someone who encounters for the first time the taut and teasing pleasures of Marvell's ‘The Garden’, and who wishes to hear more of this marvellous voice from the past, will have to survive several disappointments.

Among the earliest of those disappointments may be coming face to face with the heavy features painted perhaps by Sir Peter Lely and now in the National Portrait Gallery: big nose, pouchy cheeks and chin, mouth too full for a man, especially in the lower lip, the whole not so much redeemed as rendered problematic by the fine wide eyes and challenging gaze that characterize so many of Lely's portraits. On closer inspection, the ‘Nettleton’ portrait becomes enigmatic not only in its gaze but also in its iconography. The plain white collar or band, the plain brown jacket and skull cap share the ‘puritan’ semiotics of Lely's commonwealth style, most fully expressed in his portraits of Oliver Cromwell or Peter Pett (whose integrity Marvell would defend in his ‘Last Instructions to a Painter’); but the exuberant hair implies more courtly tendencies, while peeking out from under the stiff band is some luxurious, softer, shinier stuff, whose identification as tasselled bandstrings does little to explain away the conflicting visual message. One would have liked to know whether Marvell had fine hands to match his eyes, but the oval frame (characteristic of Lely's portraits of poets) excludes them from consideration.

Copied in reverse for the engraved portrait that appeared in Marvell's Miscellaneous Poems, posthumously published in 1681, the face is still heavier, the hair longer and more wig-like, the plain jerkin now swathed in a cloak, the eyes warier over deep bags, the mouth sensuous no longer.