by Ian Reynolds
The Irish painter Amelia Curran (1775-1847) is best known for the painting of Percy Bysshe Shelley which now hangs in the National Portrait Gallery in London.
Percy Bysshe Shelley, by Amelia Curran, oil on canvas (1819). National Portrait Gallery, London
The painting is one of the very few ad vivum images that exist of the poet; subsequent depictions of Shelley are posthumous ‘after Amelia Curran’ and largely pastiche. Edward Dowden rather harshly said of the portrait that it was ‘the hasty work of an imperfectly trained amateur’ but added that it was important as it is ‘the face of Shelley [that] is most widely known’. One of the many examples of pastiche adaptations of Curran’s Shelley, would be Joseph Severn’s painting Shelley Composing Prometheus Unbound in the Baths of Caracalla completed in 1845, twenty-three years after the poet’s death.
Shelley composing Prometheus Unbound in the Baths of Caracalla, by Joseph Severn (1845). Keats-Shelley House, Rome
It was Claire Clairmont, step sister of Mary Shelley, who thought she caught a glimpse of the old family friend Amelia Curran in the Borghese gardens in Rome on 23 April 1819. She later wrote in her journal ‘…in the Borghese—we think we see Miss Curran…’. This was very much a chance encounter; the last time Claire and Mary had seen Miss Curran, was at their family home in Skinner Street, London some years previously. They lived there with Mary’s father, the author and philosopher, William Godwin, who was previously married to Mary Wollstonecraft, author of A Vindication of the Rights of Woman’(1792). She died a few days after giving birth to Mary in 1797. Godwin married again in 1802, to Mary Jane Clairmont, Claire’s mother (Claire was originally christened Jane but later changed her name, seeing Claire as more romantic). There was little more than a year’s age difference between Mary and Claire; Amelia, or Miss Curran as she was known to them, was almost twenty years older.
Amelia’s father, John Philpot Curran (1750-1817), was a close friend of William Godwin and this is how the connection to the Shelley circle begins. Amelia Curran was a regular visitor to the Godwin household with her father, and would have known both Mary and Claire as young children. JP Curran graduated from Trinity College Dublin in 1771 and proceeded to London and to the Middle Temple in 1773 to pursue a career as a barrister. He was called to the Irish bar in 1775 and made Kings Counsel in 1782. He was a radical advocate and politician, defending many of the leaders of the Irish uprising. In 1800 Godwin spent six weeks at the Curran family estate in Ireland. Amelia’s younger sister Sarah was the fiancée of the Irish patriot Robert Emmet—this met with the disapproval of Curran who later disowned Sarah; she was to die from consumption five years later in Sicily. Following the attempted Dublin insurrection, Emmet and others were executed for treason in September 1803. Percy Bysshe Shelley had been in correspondence with William Godwin since 1811 and he gave Shelley a letter of introduction to Curran, and they met during Shelley’s ill-conceived visit to Ireland in February 1812, when he was pamphleteering and speaking at public meetings to promote political reform, repeal the Union and advocate Catholic Emancipation. Shelley dined with Curran twice but he would not engage in political discussion. Around 1814 Curran retired from public life and settled at his London residence, dying there in 1817. William Godwin dedicated his Mandeville (1817) to ‘the memory of the sincerest friend I ever had, the late John Philpot Curran’.
In Rome, Amelia Curran lived alone at Via Sistina, 64. When the Shelleys first visited they discovered that there were rooms available next door at no. 65, and they moved there in early May. During the spring of 1819 Curran began painting four portraits: Shelley, his wife Mary, their four-year old son William, and Claire Clairmont. For the purpose of this discussion, we will focus on the Shelley painting. This was unfinished when the party departed for Naples in early June 1819.
Claire Clairmont by Amelia Curran (1819). Newstead Abbey, Nottingham City Museums & Galleries
During this period Shelley became fascinated with the story of the young Roman noblewoman Beatrice Cenci, who had conspired with her step-mother and brothers to murder the father, Count Francesco Cenci in 1599. After a scandalous murder trial all but the youngest son was executed. Beatrice Cenci became a cause celebre and an enduring symbol of feminine resistance. In the nineteenth century it was generally thought that the famous La Cenci portrait was painted in prison a short time before her execution—but this is more probably simply a romantic myth.
Beatrice Cenci by Reni, Sirani, Cantofoli et al. Galleria Nazionale d’Arte Antica, Rome
The actual sitter in the portrait is likely to have been a fictional representation of Beatrice Cenci. For many years the painting was attributed to Guido Reni (1575-1642), but modern critics believe it is more likely to be a later depiction by either Elisabetta Sirani (1638-1665), or a student of hers, Ginerva Cantofoli (1618-1672). The painting could even be a self-portrait of Cantofoli herself.
Beatrice Cenci with self-portrait of Cantofoli from the Madonna of Luke (1665)
Many copies of La Cenci were in circulation and Shelley had his own copy of it hanging on the wall of Via Sistina, 65. Shelley later wrote of the painting:
There is a fixed and pale composure upon the features; she seems sad and stricken down in spirit, yet the despair thus expressed is lightened by the patience of gentleness. Her head is bound with folds of white drapery from which the yellow strings of her golden hair escape and fall about her neck. The moulding of her face is exquisitely delicate; the eyebrows are distinct and arched; the lips have that permanent meaning of imagination and sensibility which suffering has not repressed and which it seems as if death scarcely could extinguish. Her forehead is large and clear; her eyes, which we are told were remarkable for their vivacity, are swollen with weeping and lustreless, but beautifully tender and serene.
Shelley seemed obsessed with the tragic story of the House of Cenci, and in May 1819 set about an ambitious plan to write a verse drama, The Cenci. A Tragedy, in Five Acts. Mary, Claire and Miss Curran discussed the project in the studio at Via Sistina, and Claire read a manuscript of the story. She was so affected by this that the following day she wrote a biting letter to Byron, the father of her child Allegra, who was by then in his custody:
Did you ever read the history of the Cenci’s a most frightful & horrible story? I am sorely afraid to say that in the elder Cenci you may behold yourself in twenty years…but if I live Allegra shall never be a Beatrice.
Claire was certainly pulling no punches: Count Francesco Cenci was a murderer, and had allegedly sexually abused both Beatrice and other members of the family.
In the meantime, there were ongoing sittings for Amelia Curran’s portraits of Shelley, Mary, Claire and young William, which became so demanding that the Shelley entourage extended the stay in Rome until June. During this period William contracted malaria. He died on 7th June and was buried shortly thereafter in what was then called the Protestant Cemetery.
William Shelley by Amelia Curran (1819). Carl H. Pforzheimer Collection of Shelley and His Circle, The New York Public Library
On 10th June the Shelleys left Rome, with the paintings apparently abandoned in Curran’s studio. After Shelley’s death in July 1822, Mary wrote to Amelia Curran requesting Shelley’s unfinished portrait. She wrote back:
Your picture and Claire’s I left… at Rome… The one you now write for I thought was not to be inquired for; it was so ill done, and I was on the point of burning it with others before I left Italy; I luckily saved it just as the fire was scorching it, and it is packed up with my other pictures at Rome.
By 1824, Curran was again living at her old address in the Via Sistina and Mary eventually received the Shelley painting in 1825. She writes in her journal on 17th September:
Thy picture is come, my only one! Thine those speaking eyes, that animated look; unlike aught earthly wert thou ever, and art now! If thou hadst still lived, how different had been my life and feelings!
As the painting was unfinished when the Shelleys left Rome in June 1819, Curran must have completed it later from memory. It is almost like a caricature, with a blank doe-eyed look and wistful expression. There is also, as others have noted, a strong resemblance to the La Cenci portrait which hung on the wall at Shelley’s Roman residence. Shelley’s features seem almost androgynous, as if merged with the image of Beatrice Cenci.
Claire Clairmont’s portrait was painted and finished during the same period. Like many sitters, she was not entirely satisfied by the finished portrait. Her bright cheeks and dark wavy hair are clearly evident, but her somewhat stilted demeanour and the apparent fullness of the chin left the biographer Robert Gittings feeling that the portrait ‘resembles a wooden doll.’ Curran’s paintings of Mary and Claire ended up in the possession of the adventurer Edward John Trelawny (1792-1881), who retained both for the rest of his life. He famously called Claire’s portrait his ‘inseparable companion’ and considered it an ‘excellent likeness’.
Amelia Curran converted to Catholicism and died in Rome in 1847. Not forgetting her origins, she was buried at the church of the Irish Franciscan St Isidro’s College. Later, a former admirer Lord Cloncurry, recalled that ‘she was the most witty and agreeable woman I ever knew, full of talent and kindness—a musician, a painter and a writer’. He commissioned a memorial plaque to be placed in the church. He also gave a copy of her Madonna (after Murillo) to the church of St John the Baptist in Blackrock Co. Dublin.
Postscript
It would be remiss not to mention that in 2022 the Keats-Shelley Journal published an article by Andrew Stauffer which received significant media attention: The West Portrait of Percy Bysshe Shelley: A Reconsideration. This concerned a painting by the American painter William Edward West (1788-1857). The story was that while West was painting a portrait of Lord Byron in 1822, (which is now in the National Galleries of Scotland), he found the time to make a sketch of Shelley who was visiting Byron at the time, as was Leigh Hunt. This sketch was allegedly later developed into a painting by West. Almost forty years after West’s death his niece sold the painting to a Mrs Nellie Porterfield Dunn in Richmond, Virginia, saying it was of the poet Percy Bysshe Shelley. This supposed painting of Shelley was accepted as bona fide from the time it entered the public domain in 1905, until 1940, when it was ably debunked by the Shelley biographer Newman Ivey White. He cited the chronology of events (Shelley drowned in July 1822), inconsistencies in West’s own accounts (his detailed notes of his visit to paint Byron makes no mention of a sketch of Shelley); and the visual similarity to other paintings of the period. White concluded that the painting might actually have been of Leigh Hunt. Stauffer presents a largely circumstantial case to debunk the White debunking, mainly on the grounds of the similarity between the West picture and three Shelley images: Curran’s, Edward William’s spirited attempt at a watercolour, and Montpensier’s miniature of the poet when he was twelve years old.
On the left, ‘Shelley’ by William Edward West, University of Virginia Library. On the right, self-portrait of William Edward West
On the left, watercolour of Shelley, attributed to Edward Williams; on the right, Percy Bysshe Shelley by George J. Stodart, after Antoine Philippe, duc de Montpensier, National Portrait Gallery, London
Perhaps just as Joseph Severn embellished his relationship with John Keats in later years—becoming ever more unreliable with the passage of time—West did something similar. Patti Carr Black, a Mississippi historian, describes ‘the characteristics of West’s work’ as ‘elongation of form, producing an elegant and aristocratic bearing, large, liquid eyes in an expressive face, soft colours, loose brush-strokes, and vague backgrounds that were neo-classical in feeling.’ This was a style he adopted for many of his portraits, and can be seen in the supposed Shelley painting.
We may never know who the West sitter in the ‘Shelley’ painting was. At best it could be an artist’s impression of Shelley reimagined; or alternatively, it could be almost anyone from the period— perhaps even West himself.
Source material and bibliography
Dowden, Edward. The Life of Percy Bysshe Shelley. Kegan, Paul, Trench, and Co., 1886. 2 vols.
Holmes, Richard. Shelley: The Pursuit. London: HarperCollins, 1995.
Polack, Fiona. “Amelia Curran’s Newfoundland Painting”, Keats-Shelley Journal, Vol. 60, (2011), 25–29.
https://www.oxforddnb.com/
https://www.dib.ie/
https://www.haltadefinizione.com/en/news-and-me a/news/beatrice-cenci-portrait-of-a-modern-hero-with-haltadefinizione/
https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v20/n13/charles-nicholl/screaming-in-the-castle-the-case-of-beatrice-cenci
Shelley, Percy Bysshe. The Cenci. A Tragedy, in Five Acts. Livorno, Italy: Printed for C. and J. Ollier, 1819.
Clairmont, Claire. The Journals of Claire Clairmont. Edited by Marion Kingston Stocking, Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1968.
Shelley, Mary Wollstonecraft. The Letters of Mary Wollstoncraft Shelley. Edited by Betty T. Bennet, Baltimore: John Hopkins UP, 1980, 3 vols.
Gittings, Robert with Jo Manton, Claire Clairmont and the Shelleys, Oxford: Oxford UP, 1992.
Trelawny. Edward John. Recollections of the Last Days of Shelley and Byron, London: Moxon, 1858.
William Edward West and the ‘Shelley’ portrait
Stauffer, Andrew. “The West Portrait of Percy Bysshe Shelley: A Reconsideration” Keats-Shelley Journal 71 (2022): 32-47.
White, Newman Ivey, Shelley: A Biography. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1940. 2 vols
West, William Edward, and Estill Curtis Pennington. “Painting Lord Byron: An Account by William Edward West.” Archives of American Art Journal 24, no. 2 (1984): 16–21
Pennington, Estill Curtis, 2011: Lessons in Likeness: Portrait Painters in Kentucky and the Ohio River Valley, 1802-1920. Featuring works from The Filson Historical Society. The University Press of Kentucky, Lexington, Kentucky, p. 213.
Black, Patti Carr, 1998: Art in Mississippi, 1720-1980. University Press of Mississippi, p. 45.
Ian Reynolds is a retired mechanical engineer who lives in Oxfordshire. He has a personal interest in those associated with the Keats-Shelley Circle, and poets of the Romantic period, especially John Keats. He is unaffiliated. Ian’s other interests include reading, listening to music, particularly rock and jazz, road cycling and wine. He writes occasionally for the Romanticism blog of Wordsworth Grasmere.
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