The best-known portrait of Shelley was painted by an amateur artist, Amelia Curran, in Rome in 1819. Although she did not consider it a particularly good likeness, Mary Shelley wrote to the artist after the poet’s death, urgently requesting it. Curran herself thought it ‘ill done’, and told Mary ‘I was on the point of burning it with others before I left Italy – I luckily saved it just as the fire was reaching it’. A copy of the portrait was later made for Mary’s friend Jane Williams by Jane’s relative George Clint, who apparently also referred to a drawing by Edward Williams.
The Clint portrait was purchased by the National Portrait Gallery in 1900, when this copy of it was made. It is probable, however, that the artist also saw Amelia Curran’s original, which had been bequeathed to the National Portrait Gallery by Lady Shelley the previous year.
Owners
(gift of Lionel Cust, Director, National Portrait Gallery, 1903) Bodleian.
References
Mrs R. Lane Poole (rev. K. Garlick), Catalogue of Portraits in the Bodleian Library (Oxford, 2004), p. 284; Richard Walker, Regency Portraits (London: 1985), i, pp. 448-9; Shelley’s Guitar, no. 162.
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