French Portraits of Byron, 1824–1880

Abstract

The chameleon-like character of Byron makes it difficult to portray him. (Lady Blessington) Lady Blessington's comment about portraying Byron in words is just as applicable to the visual arts.1 In France, the many painted, engraved and sculpted portraits of Byron, produced from the beginning of what the poet himself called the 'contagion of Byronism' all over Europe,2 freely fantasised about Byron's personality and physical appearance, but nevertheless marked the French mind for a long time, laying the foundations of what can be considered a typically French image of Byron. Very recently, a nineteenth-century portrait of a male appeared on the Parisian art market with the following attribution: 'Lord Byron. Painted in Venice in 1817 by Laurencel'. Though presented as an unknown picture of Lord Byron by a little-known French artist,3 the portrait in question is obviously not of Byron. Featuring a man of about 25-30 years of age, with curly hair, open collar, wearing a fur coat and adopting a pose which clearly calls to mind the most famous portraits of Byron, this oil-oncanvas painting answers to a very widespread French image of Byron, which first appeared around 1820 and still persists today. It would be interesting to know whether this portrait was originally meant as a portrait of Byron - being in that case a kind of imaginary or ideal depiction of the poet - or has only retrospectively been associated with him. But what I intend to discuss here deals more with the artistic evaluation of Byron in nineteenth-century France that allows for either possibility. In early nineteenth- century France, a certain idea of Byron came into being that is expressed very clearly in this portrait. What follows is concerned with the history of this distinctive idea of Byron in French art. It is well known that the distinction between Byron and his work was blurred in his readers' minds from the outset of his publishing career. In particular, as his French translator Amedee Pichot put it, he was a 'man identified with the portraits of his heroes'.4 As Victor Hugo wrote: 'As we know Byron only through his poems, it is sweet to us to suppose him a life according to his soul and genius'.5 This identification of fact with fiction strongly affected visual representations of the noble poet. In early nineteenth-century French pictures, Byron is represented not just as a young and handsome poet, but also a seducer - and this is generally achieved through the re-use of poses and features from his British portraits (often made, it is interesting to recall, after Byron's own instructions).6 In France and beyond, large nineteenth-century history paintings based on Byron's poems frequently make characters - usually Don Juan or Manfred - look like the Byron of portraiture. This practice originated in British art (such as Richard Westall's illustrations for Childe Harold's Pilgrimage), but soon spread to France. In 1829, Francois-Louis Dejuinne re-used Westall's 1813 portrait of Byron in his Childe Harold and Ines in Cadiz, a now lost painting known through a lithograph by Aubry Lecomte.7 In 1831, Alexandre-Marie Colin did the same in his Don Juan and Haidee.8 This helps to explain how the subject of a portrait of a young dandy in early 1820s' costume, with a Romantically untidy appearance, can be so easily misidentified as Byron - and why such misidentifications were not, and apparently are still not, at all rare in France. Numerous other portraits of unknown young men have been wrongly identified as portraits of Byron, such as an oil painting often attributed to Theodore Gericault and kept in the Musee Fabre in Montpellier, traditionally called Portrait of Lord Byron,9 or Paillot de Montabert's Portrait of Lord Byron, painted in the 1820s and kept in the Musee des Beaux-Arts de Troyes.10 The art historian George Williamson once suggested that the famous eighteenth-century French portraitist Elisabeth Vigee- Lebrun, Marie-Antoinette's favourite painter, could have executed, sometime around 1805, a portrait of Byron (who was only seventeen at the time). …