The Byronic Image: The Poet Portrayed, and: Byron, Sully and the Power of Portraiture (review)

Abstract

Reviewed by: The Byronic Image: The Poet Portrayed, and: Byron, Sully and the Power of Portraiture Christine Kenyon Jones Robert Beevers , The Byronic Image: The Poet Portrayed (Abingdon: Olivia Press, 2005), pp. 163. £15 pb. 0 9542118 1 2. John Clubbe , Byron, Sully and the Power of Portraiture, The Nineteenth Century Series (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2005), pp. xi + 343. £50 hb. 0 7546 3814 6. Until a few years ago, Byron was notable for not having a book dedicated to his portraits. Despite the fact that his lordship was far and away the Romantic poet most portrayed by his contemporaries, the portraits of Wordsworth, Coleridge and Keats all became subjects of book-length studies and full-scale catalogues long before Byron's did. Suzanne K. Hyman in 1982 could still accurately refer to Byron portraiture as 'a fertile and relatively untouched field of study'. In the last few years, however, this situation has changed markedly, and the two titles currently under review join a flourishing mini-genre which has built upon the study by David Piper (1982) and catalogues by Richard Walker (1985) and Annette Peach (2000)to offer a detailed and varied exploration of Byronic portraiture and the dissemination of the poet's image. Three broad topics have come to dominate the field: first, the question of how far Byron himself was able to initiate and control the creation and spread of his portraits; second, the extent to which the visual image of the poet was influenced by the Byronic hero and the other fictional personae of Byron's work (and vice versa), and third, the way in which the original portraits taken from life were dispersed through engravings and altered in the hands of successive generations to cater for the needs of publishers and the diversity of the market for Byroniana. These two studies both concentrate mainly on the third topic, although they also discuss and contribute to the other two. Robert Beevers' study seeks to establish which pictures were available to be seen by the general public and when, and attempts to discover in what numbers particular images were circulated during Byron's lifetime and in the first half century or so after his death. Clubbe by contrast begins with a single image – Thomas Sully's 1826–8 copy (via engraving) of Richard Westall's 1813 portrait of Byron – but his much longer book ranges over a huge variety of subjects: from Lavaterian physiognomy to American portraiture of the early nineteenth century; from Westall's background and oeuvre to Fanny Kemble, the actress of whom an obsessed Sully painted no less than thirteen portraits, and from the Second Bank of America, whose President, the 'Byronic' Nicholas Biddle, was also painted by Sully, to the association between Byron and America's celebration of the fiftieth anniversary of its Revolutionary decade. Both authors downplay the significance and valueof portraits taken from life. 'The idea that there is a single image, which is by definition unique, is … called in question by the fact that artists not only had copies made of ostensibly original works, but that they could and did create images whose only claim to originality lay in the fact that they bore some resemblance to earlier portraits done from life', Beevers points out. 'They were, in fact, imaginative versions of so-called originals recollected, as it were, in tranquillity many years after the event.' This blurring of the line between originals and copies is also central to Clubbe's argument, which claims that '[t]he presence of the sitter counts for much, but the genius of the portraitist counts for still more. Portraiture isat heart a grand fiction, and as in literary fiction we usually learn best and most from the exceptionally gifted and skilled, those who used their abilities to penetrate the essence of their subject.' Both authors perceive a lack of distinction among the artists who portrayed Byron from life, and both deplore the fact that he was never painted by Sir Thomas Lawrence. Beevers does, however, approve of the 1809 George Sanders portrait of Byron with a boy alighting from a boat (or is he about to step into it? – those modish sailor-style trousers show...