Martin Crowe Portrait Unveiled at Lord’s During 150th Test
Martin Crowe was honored at Lord’s as MCC unveiled his portrait during the 150th Test to be played at the ground. The painting has been added to the Long Room, a fitting place for a player whose name still sits deep in New Zealand cricket history.
Lord’s Adds Crowe to the Long Room
The portrait is part of the celebrations around the 150th Test at Lord’s, and it marks a rare move by MCC. The organization said it does not usually commission posthumous portraits, which puts this tribute in unusual company.
Jason Brooks painted the work using thousands of photographs of Crowe. The image exists only as the painting and not as a print, making the piece a single physical record of the tribute.
Crowe’s Career at a Glance
Crowe played for New Zealand between 1982 and 1995, appearing in 77 Test matches and 143 One-Day Internationals. He scored over 10,000 runs in his international career and was named one of the Wisden Cricketers of the Year in 1985.
His Test best was 299 against Sri Lanka, a score that stayed New Zealand’s highest individual innings for more than two decades. That record helped define the scale of his batting peak long after his playing days ended.
From 1981 to 2016
Crowe’s link with Lord’s reached back to 1981, when he spent the summer on the MCC cricket staff at the ground while on a scholarship from New Zealand. He also made a century for the MCC Young Cricketers against MCC at Lord’s, a reminder that this tribute at the ground came with a long personal thread attached to it.
He died in 2016 at the age of 53, and the portrait now places him among the figures remembered in the Long Room. For visitors to Lord’s, the change is immediate: Crowe’s legacy now has a permanent place inside the ground during a milestone Test week.
