Walter Savage Landor

Inscriptionback to top

Canvas stamped: R & M 1081/Prepared by Roberson & Miller 51 Long Acre, London.

This portraitback to top

The portrait was painted in 1839 for Landor's friend John Kenyon, a Jamaica merchant who died in 1856 leaving large legacies to Mr and Mrs Browning, Bryan Procter and others. Kenyon's executors sent it to Crabb Robinson on 18 December 1856 (Diary, III, p 450 where it is described as a more striking likeness than Boxall's). Fisher was a young Irish artist befriended by Landor whose portrait was his first to be exhibited at the RA (W. G. Strickland, Dictionary of Irish Artists, 1913, I, p 349). He painted three versions, for Mrs Sophia Paynter, for Rosina Bulwer and for Kenyon; Lady Bulwer described her copy, a bust, as 'a perfect replica of the magnificent head, and admirable as to tone and pose, with just the faintest soupçon of the immortal old brown coat' (R. H. Super, Walter Savage Landor: a biography, New York, 1954, p 297); of Kenyon's copy Southey said 'the picture was as good as the likeness' though Landor himself thought 'its colour too like a dragon's belly' (John Forster, Walter Savage Landor, 1879, VII, p 414, (R. H. Super, Walter Savage Landor: a biography, New York, 1954, p 297 and Malcolm Elwin, Landor: a Replevin, 1958, p 330). A small caricature in pen and ink by Fisher, c.1840, is reproduced in Letters of Walter Savage Landor, ed. Stephen Wheeler, 1899, p 233.

Physical descriptionback to top

Half-length seated to right in tobacco-brown double-breasted suit, white shirt, black bow-tie; grey hair, grey eyes, swarthy complexion; papers on red table-cloth right; plain brown background.

Provenanceback to top

John Kenyon; Henry Crabb Robinson and bequeathed by him 1867.

Exhibitionsback to top

RA 1840 (104) and Third Exhibition of National Portraits, South Kensington, 1868 (609).


This extended catalogue entry is from the out-of-print National Portrait Gallery collection catalogue: Richard Walker, Regency Portraits, National Portrait Gallery, 1985, and is as published then. For the most up-to-date details on individual Collection works, we recommend reading the information provided in the Search the Collection results on this website in parallel with this text.

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