Historians identify lost portrait of Shelley painted days before his death
The poet Percy Bysshe Shelley has been identified in a portrait painted by an artist who met him just days before his death by drowning off the Italian coast in 1822, aged just 29.
It was created by William Edward West, the American painter, who had been struck by Shelley’s good looks while on a visit to paint Lord Byron in Tuscany.
Professor Andrew Stauffer, who has conducted the research, told The Telegraph: “This portrait captures Shelley just before his death. We don’t have better portraits of him.”
He believes that its modest size - 7.25 inches by 9.25 inches - may explain why it eluded notice before an American academic, Newman Ivey White, decided in the 1940s that it actually depicted Leigh Hunt, the English essayist, journalist and poet.
Until then, it was accepted as a portrait of Shelley, after surfacing in 1905.
Prof Stauffer said: “Then White’s debunking comes along and it disappears. But I’m basically debunking his debunking.”
Shelley had come to Italy to broker an introduction between Hunt and Byron, wanting them to collaborate on a new political poetic journal. They sought Byron’s involvement, both for his money and his fame. Literally a week after Hunt arrived, Shelley drowned after his boat foundered during a stormy return voyage to Lerici.
West later recalled their meeting, telling his nephew: “After seeing Shelley again…, I determined to paint [a] picture of him while his image was fresh in my memory.”
Prof Stauffer is President of the Byron Society of America and head of English at the University of Virginia, in whose library the painting hangs.
He made this discovery while doing research for his forthcoming book, Byron: A Life in Ten Letters, to be published by Cambridge University Press early next year.
He will publish his research in the Keats-Shelley Journal this month.
He points to evidence that West had multiple opportunities to observe Shelley in person. For example, an 1828 article titled Shelley in The Yankee and Boston Literary Gazette features West’s description of Shelley as having “the most wonderful-looking head ever seen alive on our earth”.
Prof Stauffer writes: “Published when Shelley was little known in the United States, this reference to West’s opinion of Shelley’s appearance strikes me with the force of authenticity.”
He argues that “the misdirected debunking” of this painting has “distorted our sense of Shelley’s appearance”, with the result that he has been seen primarily through lesser portraits by amateur artists.
In the newly attributed oil painting, the poet was captured by a professional who had observed him firsthand.
Of the amateur portraits, one is by Amelia Curran, who was so unhappy with her work that she threw it onto the fire, only to rescue it at the last minute.
Prof Stauffer said that putting the West and Curran portraits side by side, one sees similarities such as the straight nose with its elongated nostril, a heavily curved upper lip and a rounded chin.
White had argued that, according to contemporaries, Shelley’s hair was beginning to turn grey in 1822 and that this was absent from the portrait.
Prof Stauffer writes: “Perhaps White never saw the West portrait in person and could not see in reproductions the grey, which is plainly visible in the painting.”
— The Telegraph, 23 September 2023
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