Visual travels with Byron : British landscapes of the eastern Mediterranean in the early 19th century

• Published in: The British art journal Vol. 15; pp. 61 - 70
• Main Author: Ibata, Hélène
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: 22.03.2015
• ISSN: 1467-2006

Eugène Delacroix celebrated George Gordon Byron, better known as Lord Byron, as the poet who had the greatest influence on his pictorial production, throughout his long career. Byron's poetry fired his romantic imagination with the sublimity of its human narratives and the Oriental tales were given pride of place in his choice of subjects. The tales, "The Giaour," "The bride of Abydos," "Lara," or "The corsair," to which may be added "Sardanapalus," a drama published a few years later, provided exotic narratives with great visual potential, and Delacroix confirmed this intuition by devoting half of his exhibited work to Byronic subjects, mostly eastern ones. Delacroix production is a striking illustration of the evocative power and mediating function of Byron's poetry and narrative or dramatic representations of the Orient, for continental European artists in particular. In Britain, however, this mediation acted in a more indirect manner. To begin with, there is no example of a comparable passion for Byron among leading British artists, with the exception perhaps of Ford Madox Brown. More significantly, as has been pointed out, these painters' admiration for Byron was comparatively often expressed through quotations, rather than through the explicit illustration of subject, which suggests that in British adaptations of the poet, the emphasis was on mood and description rather than narrative. [Revised Publication Abstract]