No open-access location is known for this record yet.
No open-access location is known for this record yet.
BYRON, SULLY, AND THE POWER OF PORTRAITURE. By John Clubbe. Aldershot: Ashgate, 2005. Pp. xxii + 343. ISBN 0 7546 3814 6. £50.00. This is an extraordinary, obsessive and magnificent book. Somewhere, in private hands, is a portrait of Byron by the American artist Thomas Sully. Sully never met Byron, who was dead when Sully painted him (1826-28) and the portrait is a free copy (Clubbe's word is 'imitation') of the work by Richard Westall (1813), which is now in the National Portrait Gallery, London. The relationship between the two paintings might, for the generality of art historians, suggest material for a mere note or, at most, a journal article. Clubbe's achievement is to use the story of the now hidden painting by Sully to write a cultural history of the British and American art world at the beginning of the nineteenth century. That history develops into a survey of the relationship between portraiture, the idea of history and the formation of national consciousness. Only in the last quarter of the book does Clubbe come close to the texture, psychology and iconography of Sully's Byron. He argues, with persuasive passion, the apparent paradox that the image of Byron created by Sully (from his imagination and Westall) is truer to the poet and more revelatory of the man than Westall's original. Sully was the greater painter, at the height of his powers and imbued with Lavatarian insights into physiognomy and character. Byron lives in his image as in no other representation. This is why Clubbe's book is 'extraordinary'. It is 'obsessive' in its multiplication of detail. The story of Sully's Byron begins with a survey of the painting's provenance, but each owner becomes the subject of biographical disquisition and digression. There follows an account of life portraits of Byron, and then we move to Sully himself. At this point, in Byronic mode, digression becomes the subject, but, as the argument develops, a kind of epic quality emerges. The apparent digressions are, in fact, episodes on the peripatetic journey back to the originary 'Ithaca': the reason why Sully chose to paint his Byron, and why he was painted in this way. Detailed discussion of four portraits by Sully make up half the book: George Frederick Cooke as Richard III and George Washington crossing the Delaware (two leaders of men, one evil, one a hero for his nation) and two sensuous young women, Fanny Kemble and the young Queen Victoria about to mount her throne. Sully was master of both male and female portraiture and bisexuality is intrinsic in the image and psychology of Byron. But before we come to the poet himself yet another figure intrudes: Nicholas Biddle ('Byronic Biddle'), banker and philhellene and the subject of one of the most lustrous of Sully's male portraits. One section from Clubbe's synopsis indicates the way in which scholarly details obsessively crowd the text: 'Biddle made president of the Second Bank of the United States - Andrew Jackson attacks the Bank - Biddle's resignation and retirement to his family home, Andalusia - Greek Revival architecture - William Strickland and the design for Girard College [...].' No detail is too small to escape Clubbe's microscopic eye (for instance, one delicious bit of information concerns Wordsworth's predilection for olfactory sex). But this 'obsession' for minutiae, ultimately, is part of the 'magnificence' of this book. It is the necessary empiricism behind the humanistic scholarship on which the profound critical insights are based. …
Loading…
Imported from OpenAlex (CC0) — nothing here is generated.