SOUTHEY (ROBERT)

PORTRAIT ATTRIBUTED TO JOHN JAMES MASQUERIER (1778-1855), oil on canvas, framed, 36 x 28in. (914 x 711mm.), [c.1812]

Footnotes

'THE FAITHFUL PAINTER'S EYE/ HAD FIX'D ME LIKE A SPELL'

The prolific and accomplished portraitist John James Masquerier attracted a loyal following amongst the intellectual and artistic communities at the turn of the nineteenth-century, numbering Emma Hamilton and Warren Hastings among his sitters, and so it is unsurprising he would have painted the Poet Laureate Robert Southey. Their acquaintance came about through a mutual friendship with Henry James Pye, the self-styled "rhymer for life" (James Sambrook, ODNB), whom Southey was to succeed as Poet Laureate in 1813.

Masquerier was born into a Huguenot family in London. He returned to Paris in 1789, where he achieved considerable success in the Academy of the Tuileries under Carle Vernet. He returned to London three years later after the storming of the Tuilleries to enrol at the Royal Academy Schools, and excelled there as he had done in Paris. Masquerier and Southey would have found common ground at their mutual horror of Bonaparte, although Southey's politics by this time were less extreme than those of his Romantic peers.

In a subtle difference to conventional society portraiture, Southey rests his hand on a book, looking up at a moment of poetical inspiration, and epitomises the young, handsome, romantic poet at the time when his career was taking him to new heights. Even now he exudes an air of confidence which later critics would call 'absurd self- importance' (Geoffrey Carnall, ODNB). He has abandoned the longer locks depicted in Peter Vandyke's romantic portrait of 1795 and Robert Hancock's profile of 1796 (both NPG), so this work would be more contemporaneous with Henry Eldridge's drawing of 1804 and Edward Nash's later watercolour of 1820 (NPG). At the time this portrait was painted Southey was living at Greta Hall, Keswick, with his own family, the abandoned Sara Coleridge and her children and the widow of the poet Robert Lovell and her son, where he remained until his death in 1843.