Lot 36: BYRON, GEORGE GORDON, Lord (1788-1824, poet)

TWO PORTRAITS:

i) BY AN UNKNOWN ARTIST, pencil drawing, head and shoulders, profile facing right, head slightly raised, captioned below on original leaf onto which the drawing is tipped 'An original sketch of Lord Byron' in an early nineteenth-century 'print' (possibly female) hand and with a note on the verso in another nineteenth-century hand 'Original, unpublished sketch of Lord Byron from life (artist unknown)', framed and glazed, size of image 3¾ x 3¼ inches (9.5 x 8 cm), overall size 10¼ x 9 ¼ inches (25.5 x 23.5 cm) [early nineteenth century]

Dr Annette Peach published this drawing in her thesis on portraits of Byron and subsequently in the Walpole Society, 2000. She noted: 'In the attention given to the profile line, the sketch resembles that made by Lady Byron in 1815 which also shows the sitter facing to the right, a pose Byron did not adopt with professional artists...in the absence of any known provenance the identification of the sitter remains conjectural.' It is interesting in view of the fact that Byron was known to have a slight malformation of the ear-lobe that Dr Peach notes of this portrait 'ear-lobe indistinct'.

ii) BY CRAWFORD, bronzed base metal round medallion, head and shoulders, profile facing left, signed 'Crawford' on the truncation, inscribed on the verso of the frame 'Medallion portrait of the poet... "The Byron is the finest likeness of the Noble Poet we have ever seen" – Edinburgh Evening Post', framed and glazed in a contemporary square miniature frame with ring for suspension, size of image 4¼ inches (11 cm), overall size 6 x 6 inches (15 x 15 cm), [nineteenth century]

The following entry under Crawford appears in L. Forrer, Biographical Dictionary of Medallists, 1904: '(Brit.) A Glasgow Die-sinker of the early part of the nineteenth century...'