Lord Byron's Dream
Lord Byron's Dream is a landscape painting by the British artist and future President of the Royal Academy Charles Lock Eastlake. Painted in Rome in 1827 while Eastlake was on an artistic grand tour, it was shipped to England and placed in the care of his friend William Turner who had admired it while he himself was in Italy and assisted in its exhibition at the 1829 Royal Academy summer exhibition, while Eastlake was still abroad.[1]
| Lord Byron's Dream | |
|---|---|
_-_Lord_Byron's_'Dream'_-_N00898_-_National_Gallery.jpg.webp) | |
| Artist | Charles Lock Eastlake |
| Year | 1827 |
| Type | Oil on canvas, historical painting |
| Location | Tate Gallery, London |
The painting is inspired by Lord Byron's 1816 poem The Dream[2] and depicts the romantic writer on his travels taking a rest by a ruined temple and dreaming his future poem.[3] It refers specifically to lines 114-122 of the poem and may have inspired Turner's own later work Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage (exhibited in 1832) based on another of Byron's poems.[4]
It is now in the collection of the Tate Gallery in London, having been acquired in 1872.[5] An 1833 print engraving by James Tibbits Willmore based on Eastlake's work is now in the Yale Center for British Art.
References
- https://www.tate.org.uk/art/artworks/eastlake-lord-byrons-dream-n00898
- Beaton p.16
- Beevers p.130
- Heffernan p.344
- https://www.tate.org.uk/art/artworks/eastlake-lord-byrons-dream-n00898
Bibliography
- Beevers, Robert. The Byronic Image: The Poet Portrayed. Olivia Press, 2005.
- Beaton, Roderick. Byron's War: Romantic Rebellion, Greek Revolution. Cambridge University Press, 2013.
- Heffernan, James. Cultivating Picturacy: Visual Art and Verbal Interventions. Baylor University Press, 2006 .
- Solecki, Sam. The Etruscans in the Modern Imagination. McGill-Queen's Press, 2022
- St Clair, William. Who Saved the Parthenon?: A New History of the Acropolis Before, During and After the Greek Revolution. Open Book Publishers, 2022.