Lord Byron

Byron sat for Westall in 1813, when he was twenty-five. He admired the artist’s realism: ‘I happen to know this portrait was not a flatterer, but dark and stern,’ he wrote in his journal, ‘even as black as the mood in which my mind was scorching last July when I sat for it. All the others of me – like most portraits whatsoever – are, of course, more agreeable than nature.’ Westall was also employed by John Murray to illustrate the 1819 edition of Byron’s Childe Harold.

Westall, Richard (artist)

1813

canvas and coloured oil-based paints

portraits
oil painting (technique)

Byron, George Gordon Byron Baron, 1788-1824

Gift of the fourth Earl of Effingham (Henry Alexander Gordon Howard), 1914.

KSH

Salone

ART-029