Byron, Sully, and the Power of Portraiture

First published in 2005. Since the early nineteenth century, Byron, the man and his image, have captured the hearts and minds of untold legions of people of all political and social stripes in Britain, Europe, America, and around the world. This book focuses on the history and cultural significance for Federal America of the only portrait of Byron known to have been painted by a major artist. In private hands from 1826 until this day, Thomas Sulley’s Byron has never before been the subject of scholarly study. Beginning with the discovery of the portrait in 1999 and a 200-year narrative of the portrait’s provenance and its relation to other well-known Byron portraits, the author discusses the work within the broad context of British and American portraiture of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries.

Illustrations; Preface; The Discovery – Acknowledgements; Introduction: The Importance of Portraiture; 1. Provenance of a Painting 2. Portraits of Byron 3. First Portrait of Philadelphia 4. Dramatic and Historic Portraiture: George Frederick Cooke and George Washington’s Passage of the Delaware 5. Dramatic and Historic Portraiture: Fanny Kemble and Queen Victoria 6. Byronic Biddle 7. The Heroic Decade: Lafayette to Byron 8. A Portrait for Americans: Sully’s Byron 9. Lavater’s Physiognomy and Sully’s Byron 10. Sully’s Byron: The Quest for Verisimilitude in Portraiture; Abbreviations; Notes; Select Bibliography; Index

John Clubbe