I WAS WANDERING through the National Portrait Gallery last week, when I spotted a most extraordinary man. He was hunched in the shadows, a long, intelligent face looking out from under a floppy, wide-brimmed hat. He was young, in his early twenties, I should say, and the moustache on his upper lip was a sad, thin thing. Yet his eyes were wise. There was something intense and self-conscious about him; as he looked away, his expression was at once melancholy, wry and self-mocking.

This was the face of John Donne, the English poet, painted in about 1595 by an unknown hand. Since January, the gallery has been seeking to raise the £1.4 million needed to buy the Newbattle portrait of Donne. This week the National Heritage Memorial Fund donated £750,000 to the appeal, which leaves three more weeks to raise the last £100,000 needed to keep the painting in Britain.

It is almost a Donne deal. I make no apology for that weak pun, for Donne himself loved to word-play with his own name. Indeed, the open collar of his embroidered shirt in the portrait may be a play on the word undone/un-Donne.

It may seem extravagant to spend so much money on a small, smoky portrait of a horse-faced young man, but I would argue that the tiny proportion of your taxes that is devoted to art would never been better spent. The Newbattle portrait is not just a great artistic rendering of a great artist; it is a reflection of a particular sort of British sensibility that would be out of place anywhere but in our national gallery of faces.

Donne was more than a poet. He was also a politician, a pop star of sorts, a man of God and a man of passion, a young rake and an inspired preacher. Satire and seriousness run through his poetry like veins through marble. In both his life and works, Donne represents a particularly British ideal: the adventurer-poet, the pirate-priest, exploring intellect and emotion, the sacred and the secular. Even his failings seem peculiarly British: a charm alloyed with arrogance, self-recrimination and self-irony.

His poetry is so deeply embedded in our culture that it has become cliché, the highest honour. His words are so well known that most people don’t realise they know them: “No man is an island”, “For whom the bell tolls”. “Catch a falling star,” warbled Perry Como, four centuries after Donne wrote: “Go, and catch a falling star . . . teach me to hear mermaids singing.”

Donne’s poems struggle with the paradoxes and perplexities of the things that have always mattered: love, sex, death, truth and belief. His lyrics were set to music by contemporaries, sung to the accompaniment of the cittern (a sort of lute) and played in barber shops while customers were shaved. The poems were passed on from hand to hand; various composers offered different musical versions. A 16th-century Bob Dylan, Donne’s new releases were downloaded by fans, copied and covered, just like a modern album.

He lived, at first, a rackety, rock star life. Born a Catholic, he saw his brother perish in prison, and an uncle hanged, drawn and quartered for his religion. He sailed on the 1596 naval expedition against Cádiz. He knocked around London in his show-off hat and frilly shirt, went to the theatre, wrote exquisite poetry and fell in love, a lot. The Newbattle portrait may well be an elaborate chat-up routine, a love letter in paint: Donne strikes the pose of the melancholy lover, and in the corner is written the inscription illumine tenebr(as) nostras domina: oh lady, illuminate our darkness. History does not relate who the lady was, or whether she succumbed.

In a scandal that would sit easily in the 21st century, Donne eloped with the teenage Anne More, the niece of his powerful patron. Her outraged father had the poet imprisoned. With bleak wit Donne wrote: “John Donne, Anne Donne, Undone.” Their marriage produced 12 children and some of the most delightful love poetry in any language: To His Mistress Going to Bed, The Flea and A Valediction: Forbidding Mourning. When Anne died, at the age of 33, Donne was heart- broken: “She whom I lov’d hath paid her last debt . . .” He is thought never to have written another love poem. By then, he had been adopted into the Establishment: he renounced Catholicism, become MP for Brackley, took holy orders and ended up as Dean of St Paul’s Cathedral.

Like an ageing star, the respectable churchman looked back on the Newbattle portrait as a memento of a libertine youth, with a little embarrassment perhaps, but also a hint of pride: “That Picture of myne wch is taken in Shaddowes and was made very many yeares before I was of this profession.”

Comparisons are odious (another gift from Donne’s quill), but looking around the National Portrait Gallery it is hard to find another face that radiates so much character and charisma. Even the various depictions of Shakespeare, among which the Newbattle portrait now hangs, seem stiff and artificial alongside Donne’s rangy, sad half-grin. Holbein’s portrait of Henry VIII was selected, this year, as one of the 12 essential English icons. Yet Donne’s face, and his poetry, are surely far closer to a definition of what Englishness means than Holbein’s gorgeous and brutal portrait of power.

Over the past 26 years, the National Heritage Memorial Fund has saved numerous artefacts that “give something tangible to our sense of identity”, including the Mappa Mundi, Wordsworth’s cottage and the Flying Scotsman. But nothing comes closer to that identity than the Renaissance pop-star-preacher with the twinkle in his eye who, with a bit of luck and a bit more money, will now remain in his own land.

As he might have put it himself: the boy Donne good.

Read other articles by Ben Macintyre here

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