Algernon Charles Swinburne

William Bell Scott

1860

Oil on canvas

47 3/4 x 31.7 inches

"'The most extragantly artistic alive in the world today' was Guy de Maupassant's opinion of Swinburne. This portrait showing Swinburne standing before the wild seas off the Northumberland coast with he so strongly identified, captures the young poet's mercurial temperament." — Lionel Lambourne, p. 11

Scott's portrait, one should add, is also quite prescient, since the poet, who did not publish his first volume of poems until six years after he sat for the painter, only published his most famous philosphical landscape medidations, such as "Evening on the Broads" and "By the North Sea," decades later. — George P. Landow