ABSTRACT
Thomas Sully's Byron appears to be a work of astonishing verisimilitude. The facial expression of Sully's Byron gives us a sense of the poet's inner life, an illusion of mobility. Byron's portraits vary from historical documents to poetry. Byron thought much about flattery in portraiture. Artists are now creating portraits of Byron about as frequently as when the poet was alive. Touched with Fire, Kay Redfield Jamison's study of manic-depressive illness, features Byron as one of its star exhibits. The dustjacket of Byromania, a volume of essays edited by Frances Wilson, juxtaposes Phillips's Albanian Byron with a still of Hugh Grant as Byron from the film Rowing in the Wind. The individual on the cover of Jerome McGann's collection of essays, Byron and Romanticism, was once thought to be a portrait of Byron by Gericault, but it has long been known to be neither.
