Byron’s Fashionable Abstention

Abstract

I begin this chapter on Byron—on the way his public image as a fashionable author of genius manifested itself in his contemporary collections of poetry—with an account of a private portrait painted by George Sanders in 1807–08 that Byron presented to his mother before leaving for his Grand Tour in 1809. Like the portraits of Pope and Robinson that I examine in the preceding chapters, this portrait of Byron is one in which the hands seem to invite iconographic interpretation (Fig. 6.1). The portrait would ultimately become the frontispiece to the first authoritative posthumous collection of Byron’s works, edited by Thomas Moore and published by John Murray in 1832, where it would be entitled “Byron at Nineteen.” Annette Peach describes the painting as “Remarkable for its prefigurement of Byron’s future destiny as a visual symbol of the romantic movement … perhaps the most widely-known portrait of Byron during the nineteenth century through the Finden brothers’ engravings” (28). Robert Beevers attributes the success of the portrait in part to “its suggestion of a classical statue. The head half-turned across the bust; the graceful lines of the arms from shoulder to finger-tip; the ‘movement’ of the torso: all carry references to the Greek ideal as perceived in the prevailing Neo-classical aesthetic” (13).