Popular Myths Popular Myth

Warts and All

"Including all faults and flaws, with nothing flattering left out."

The story told everywhere is that Oliver Cromwell, sitting for a portrait by Sir Peter Lely, instructed him: "remark all these roughnesses, pimples, warts, and everything as you see me, otherwise I will never pay a farthing for it." The trouble is where this quote actually comes from. Its earliest appearance in print is Horace Walpole's Anecdotes of Painting in England in 1764, more than a century after Lely painted Cromwell, and Walpole attributes it not to Cromwell directly but to a secondhand story from a conversation between a duke and an architect. The exact phrase "warts and all" doesn't appear in print until 1824, in an address delivered in Massachusetts by Alpheus Cary.

Myth vs. FactCromwell is widely credited with coining this phrase during his own lifetime. In reality, the earliest source is over a century after his death, and even that source presents it as a secondhand anecdote, not a direct quotation. Historians consider it likely apocryphal.

Sources: Horace Walpole, Anecdotes of Painting in England (1764); the specific phrase 'warts and all' first documented in print in 1824.

Warts and All

Quick react

Discuss