Percy Bysshe Shelley

1 portrait

© National Portrait Gallery, London

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Percy Bysshe Shelley

by Amelia Curran
oil on canvas, 1819
23 1/2 in. x 18 3/4 in. (597 mm x 476 mm)
Bequeathed by the sitter's daughter-in-law, Jane, Lady Shelley, 1899
Primary Collection
NPG 1234

On display in Room 17 on Floor 3 at the National Portrait Gallery

Sitterback to top

Artistback to top

  • Amelia Curran (1775-1847), Painter. Artist or producer associated with 5 portraits.

This portraitback to top

One of the few portraits of the poet, it was painted in Rome by the art student, Amelia Curran. Though begged from her by Mary Shelley after her husband's death, it was not much liked by his friends.

Related worksback to top

Linked publicationsback to top

Placesback to top

  • Place made: Italy (Rome, Italy)

Events of 1819back to top

Current affairs

Peterloo Massacre leaves eleven dead and four hundred wounded as crowds, gathered to hear radical Henry Hunt call for reform of the House of Commons, are forcibly dispersed.
Six Acts are passed, stiffening the 1795 Treason Act and introducing a tax on the periodical press which was viewed as seditious.

Art and science

Percy Bysshe Shelley writes Ode to the West Wind during a year of extraordinary creativity in which he also finishes Prometheus Unbound.
Lord Byron publishes his tour-de-force Don Juan; one man's mock-epic odyssey through a world without fixed principles.
First ship with a steam engine crosses the Atlantic in twenty-eight days.

International

Thomas Jefferson establishes the University of Virginia.
Royal Navy anti-slave squadron is set up to patrol the West African coastline.
French physician Rene Laennac invents the stethoscope.

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Nigel à Brassard

29 September 2022, 07:21

Recently discovered letters of the nineteenth-century travel guide writer Mariana Starke show that she was responsible for shipping this Curran portrait of Shelley to Mary Shelley from Italy to England in 1825.