The Byron Image
WALSH, PATRICK J.
The Byron Image A post-mortem portrait reveals the sitter. by Patrick J. Walsh Walking into the Owen Gallery on New York's 75th Street in April 1999, John Clubbe saw a gorgeous portrait of Lord...
...Sorely out of humor with the world, he defied it by further asserting his wit, his ego, and his fearsome pride...
...Now we have an epic portrait to go with Byron's epic masterpiece, "Don Juan...
...Below the canvas, a card attributed the portrait to Thomas Sully (1783-1872...
...A Byron scholar for 40 years, he knew all the major portraits of the poet but had never seen this one...
...James Fenimore Cooper, a Federalist and no friend of Thomas Jefferson, was overcome with emotion when he viewed Sully's portrait of Jefferson at West Point...
...Commodore Jacob Jones invited him aboard the USS Constitution for an official visit as it lay in anchor off Leghorn in 1822...
...They turned inward on themselves...
...The Romantics had reacted against Europe's secular materialism and faith in science—or, as Yeats put it, "Newton, Descartes took the world and left us excrement instead...
...Byron had sought an escape from despair in sexual escapades, but experience brought him only despondency...
...Byron's death on the anniversary of the Battles of Lexington and Concord made him all the more popular in America...
...It is more engaging, confident and full of life, ruddy and redolent of Scottish good looks, stiff breezes, and blasts of whiskey...
...John Clubbe has brought to light an American masterpiece that had been virtually unknown—"never exhibited, never engraved and never discussed by scholars of Sully or of Byron...
...Born in England, he came to America as a child, and studied in England under Benjamin West and Sir Thomas Lawrence...
...With no deep religious belief to sustain them, the Romantic poets became disconsolate chimeras, searching for some abiding spiritual truth...
...It also rejected human experience, common sense, and religion...
...As Byron revitalized poetry in his time, so Thomas Sully "introduced into American portraiture a Romantic sensibility, a livelier palette, a heightened energy and flair, a sense of drama," as John Clubbe writes in Byron, Sully, and the Power of Portraiture...
...There is no greater summary of Byron or of "Don Juan" than the critic Paul Elmer More's: "Out of the bitterness of his soul, out of the wreck of his passions which though heroic in intensity had ended in quailing of the heart, he had sought what the great makers of epic had sought—a solace and a sense of uplifted freedom...
...But the Romantics never clearly articulated a refutation of the godless universe of the scientist...
...Most Americans know Sully from his handsome portrait of Andrew Jackson that adorns the $20 bill, but Clubbe points out that many of Sully's works are inaccessible to the public...
...George Bancroft, the American historian who was also a guest on board that day, wrote that "finding all on board to be Americans, Lord Byron's manners became easy, frank and cheerful...
...but passing to the opposite extreme, by showing the power of the human heart to mock at all things, he would still set forth the possibility of standing alone and apart from all things...
...They know that human beings encounter Patrick J. Walsh is a writer in Massachusetts...
...things through the senses, and that reverence lends itself to love and to a deeper understanding for the mystery of things—a dimension beyond the realm of science...
...Byron desired a place of refuge from the dominant secular order of science, rising commerce, and material innovation—"Inven-tions that help man as true / As shooting them at Water-loo"—and denied fealty to such a world...
...In "Don Juan," Byron defied the modern, de-rationalized world with aristocratic disdain: When Bishop Berkeley said 'there was no matter,' And proved it—'t was no matter what he said: They say his system 't is in vain to batter, Too subtle for the airiest human head...
...While the poet was sensitive about this feature, others found it striking...
...The new scientific method rejected the validity of such poetic knowledge...
...For the next six years Clubbe sought out the enigma of the portrait and the painter...
...Not only was Byron pleased by American frigates, he was also impressed by American writers, particularly Washington Irving...
...His perfunctory judgment told him this was the work of some great master...
...But Byron, it should be noted, was more Scottish than English, and Sully's portrait captures Byron's Scottish essence...
...one theory made man a material beast and the other a disembodied intellect...
...In 1822 Shelley drowned off the coast of Italy...
...Touring another American ship Byron was pleased to find a New York edition of his poems...
...At age 36 Byron thought his "days in the yellow leaf / The flowers and fruits of love are gone / The worm, the canker, and the grief are mine alone...
...By contrast, poets approach the total reality and mystery of human existence, and do so with reverence...
...In exile, Byron would have nothing to do with the English, who peered at him from a distance through telescopes...
...The heroic ideal was gone, the refuge of religion was gone...
...He too went beyond the limits of destiny by laughter as Homer and Virgil and Milton had risen by the imagination and in doing this, he wrote the modern epic...
...Newton imprisoned man in a world of infinite matter, without beginning or end, while Descartes removed himself from the world of matter, retreating into abstractions of the mind...
...Clubbe stood transfixed, staring at Byron's face...
...It left him utterly astonished...
...Byron insisted on profiles because one eye was bigger than the other, and of a slightly different color...
...Once, hoping to find a copy of Irving's latest work in a trunk sent from England, Byron rummaged in vain...
...Instead of reasoning their way back to sanity by incorporating head and heart, the Romantics tended to deny reason, postulating feeling instead...
...Compared with Sully's, Westall's portrait is self-absorbed and English, a kind of weak tea with too much milk and sugar...
...by Patrick J. Walsh Walking into the Owen Gallery on New York's 75th Street in April 1999, John Clubbe saw a gorgeous portrait of Lord Byron hanging on the gallery wall...
...Byron appeared to be settling down in Italy with the beautiful young Countess Teresa Guiccioli...
...He soon sailed for Greece, dying there on April 19, 1824, during the war for Greek independence...
...Sully spent 60 years of his life in Philadelphia, first settling there in 1810...
...He studied all of Byron's portraits, gathering information for years from other painters and from the poet's close friends, and chose the profile pose Byron struck for Richard Westall in 1813...
...He thought marriage would tame him, yet his marriage dissolved in less than a year...
...George Gordon Lord Byron (1788-1824) held both Europe and America spellbound during the Romantic age...
...For several decades after the fall of Napoleon, the Romantics shaded and colored the daydreams of young Europeans and Americans...
...Upon finding a volume of Jeremy Bentham instead, he hurled it across the room...
...in 1823 Byron's daughter Allegra died of a fever...
...Sully's paintings possess a power that captures the "dramatic individuality" of the person...
...But he had a fondness for Americans: "Americans are the only people whom I never refuse to show myself...
...Rumors of mistreating his wife soon hounded him out of England, and in 1816, he left never to return...
...During their lovemaking she sometimes paused to make the sign of the cross when she heard church bells ringing...
...And yet who can believe it...
...Yet he remained restless...
...Both systems alienated man from himself, and from other men...
...Byron, Shelley, and Keats drifted to Rome, which Shelley renamed "a paradise of exiles...
...I would shatter Gladly all matters down to stone or lead, Or adamant, to find the world a spirit, And wear my head, denying that I wear it...
...Thomas Sully always had a great interest in Byron, and his portrait was not done ad vivam ("from life...
...The Yankees are great friends of mine...
Vol. 12 • October 2006 • No. 6
