Foster 107

Charles Lamb (1775-1834), clerk in the East India House 1792-1825, 1826

A seated figure, three-quarter length, dressed in black. The right hand, holding a pen, rests upon a number of official documents. Behind are two volumes, one of which is labelled ‘Elia’. A red curtain forms the background, and in the distance is seen the front of the East India House.

50 by 40 ins (127.6 by 102.5 cms)

Purchased, 1902, from the daughter of Sir Thomas Talfourd, the former owner.

Exhibited: Royal Society of British Artists, 1826; Exhibition, ‘Le Livre Anglais,’ Bibliothèque Nationale, Paris 1951-52. Engraved: H.H. Meyer, published ‘Leigh Hunt, Byron and some of his contemporaries’ (London, 1828)

Lamb refers to the picture in one of his letters ‘(The letters of Charles Lamb,’ ed. A. Ainger (London, 1888), ii, 188). Talfourd considered it the best of all portraits of Lamb. Leigh Hunt, on the other hand, while admitting it to be ‘by many degrees the best, or rather the least unsatisfactory’ of all he had seen, thought that it did not do full justice to the sitter. ‘There was’, he says, 'a general resemblance to the form and look of the fact - what is called by courtesy a ‘likeness’ - but as to the high and various intellectual characteristics of it, they were wholly wanting, no less than the general and individual expressions; and in their place we had one of those amiable nonentities so aptly described as ‘portrait of a gentleman’. Crabb Robinson thought it ‘a strong likeness’, but added, 'it gives L the air of a thinking man, more like the framer of a system of philosophy than of the genial and gay effusions of Elia.’

A reduced copy in oil, said to have been painted by Meyer, was shown by Sir Charles Dilke at the Guelph Exhibition, 1891. Another small copy, attributed to the same artist, is in the National Portrait Gallery (1312).