Thomas Sully's Portrait of Lord Byron

Abstract

If only Lawrence had painted Byron, sighs the connoisseur of portraiture, all too aware that Britain's greatest portrait painter never had a go at the age's most celebrated poet. Representations of Byron - pictures, sketches, busts, medallions - proliferated during his lifetime and long after. They continue to this day. With his auburn curls, luminous, bewitching eyes, and full, voluptuous lips, Byron, in Trelawny's dramatic juxtaposition, had 'the form and features of an Apollo, with the feet and legs of a sylvan satyr'.1 From 1812, when the author of Childe Harold's Pilgrimage woke up to find himself famous, to 1816, when he exiled himself from his native land, Thomas Lawrence stood at the height of his powers. Byron's was a face to faint for, and faint the ladies did. 'That pale face is my fate,' sighed the discarded Caroline Lamb, 'toute entiere a sa proie attachee.'2 'It was one of those faces,' she wrote in her novel Glenarvon (1816), 'which, having once beheld, we never afterwards forget. It seemed as if the soul of passion had been stamped and printed upon every feature.'3 Even Claire Clairmont, discarded even more brutally than Lady Caroline, mooned over the 'wild originality' of Byron's countenance.4 Not all or even most surviving descriptions of Byron are by women. In numbers and even in enthusiasm the men have it. The Byron they describe often appears otherworldly. The first and only time Coleridge saw Byron occurred during a magical halfhour on 10 March 1816: 'he has the sweetest Countenance I ever beheld - his eyes are really Portals of the Sun'. A few days later the sun still shone. 'If you had seen Lord Byron,' Coleridge wrote, you could scarcely disbelieve him - so beautiful a countenance I scarcely ever saw - his teeth so many stationary smiles - his eyes the open portals of the sun - things of light, and for light - and his forehead so ample, and yet so flexible, passing from marble smoothness into a hundred wreathes and lines and dimples correspondent to the feelings and sentiments he is uttering.5 'A brother poet,' Scott recalled in 1816, compared Byron's features 'to the sculpture of a beautiful alabaster vase, only seen to perfection when lighted up from within.' Most likely the 'brother poet' was Coleridge.6 The available engravings 'give one no impression of him,' thought Scott; 'the lustre is there, ... but is not lighted up. Byron's countenance is a thing to dream of.'7 For Scott, Byron's extraordinary personal beauty lay as much in the observer's mind and imagination as in reality. 'Lord Byron's head,' wrote his son-in law John Gibson Lockhart, 'is, without doubt, the finest in our time - I think it better, on the whole, than either Napoleon's, or Goethe's, or Canova's, or Wordsworth's.'8 Testimony from sources so varied - several not otherwise friendly to Byron - indicates the degree to which the poet's physical appearance mesmerized contemporaries. This is of course the younger Byron. In Italy after 1816, older and greyer, alternately bloated and lean, Byron nevertheless continued to dazzle onlookers. The Countess Albrizzi, a big fan, sighed in 1819, 'It would be to little purpose to dwell upon the mere beauty of a countenance in which the expression of an extraordinary mind was so conspicuous'. But like all the others she cannot resist the temptation: she details the forehead, the hair, the eyes ('expressive', 'azure'), the teeth, cheeks, neck, hands, figure.9 Trelawny, no fan at all, looking back in 1858, said that 'in external appearance Byron realised the ideal standard with which imagination adorns genius'.10 James Hamilton Browne, travelling with Byron to Cephalonia in 1823, portrays the older Byron in words that evoke the younger: The contour of his countenance was noble and striking; the forehead, particularly so, was nearly white as alabaster. His delicately formed features were cast rather in an effeminate mould, but their soft expression was in some degree relieved by the mustaches of a light chestnut, and a small tuft 'a la houssard,' which he at that time sported. …