Frederick Christian Lewis after Comte d'Orsay

Lord Byron

17 x 22 inches

This portrait of a young Lord Byron depicts him on board a ship with his hand on the tiller, looking pensively out to sea. George Gordon Byron (1788-1824) was an Anglo-Scottish poet best remembered as one of the leading exponents of the Romantic movement. He graduated from Cambridge and travelled extensively in Europe with a particular fascination for Italy where he lived for seven years. He became as famous for his hedonistic lifestyle as his poetry, inspiring generations of romantics with both. He ran up enormous debt, always eager to sample the best that life had to offer and embarked upon numerous and often intense relationships with both men and women.

F. C.Lewis (1779-1856) was a prolific mixed method engraver of numerous subjects after his contemporaries. He was born in London, became a pupil of Joseph Stadler and went on to study at the Royal Academy. At the point where this engraving was produced in 1845 he had become appointed by Queen Victoria as the official engraver of her drawings.