ABSTRACT
The American poet and critic Henry Tuckerman thought Sully sympathized 'with the fair and lovely, rather than the grand and comic'. His forte was 'the graceful'. The ladies liked him, he liked them. In Sully's era many believed 'that female portraiture, being concerned necessarily with beauty, should be generalized; whereas male portraiture could be more individualized'. Lord Byron combined in his being masculine and feminine. Hazlitt, presciently sensitive to sexuality in art, was well aware that Byron's feminine side often came to the fore in his portraits. Imperious females such as Fanny Kemble and Queen Victoria vied with strong-minded males, George Frederick Cooke and Washington, in determining Sully's conception of the poet. If Byron obsessed Fanny Kemble, Fanny obsessed Sully. Offerings to the goddess, his portraits pay homage to a woman he found enormously appealing. Like Lawrence before him, Sully may have been half in love with Fanny, or with her face, or with her as an incarnation of someone else.
