Portraits Of Lord Byron, In Order Of Lord Byron-ness
Ver-r-r-y Byron. At first glance, you might be tempted to think, “Not very Byron,” because there are other people in the picture, and his alabaster brow isn’t the focal point. This is an error. “You there, boy, fetch into this dinghy and sail into yon exhilarating storm, while I stand here and clench my fist over this rock. If you drown in the background, it will make for a very exciting painting.” He’s wearing like eighteen ascots and they’re all flowing in a tempest, plenty of Byron here.
SOLID POUTY BYRON. He’s got some secret freaky brocade vest on under his cloak, which is probably full of dildos, his brow situation is ferociously organized, his out-of-frame hand is probably jerking off the devil, because there’s some sort of flame situation going on in the lower right-hand corner.
Eight out of ten Byrons. Look at his SEXUAL SNEERING.
What is this
woman
doing in my portrait
ss her hair more luxurious than mine
I hope she falls down this hill and
dies
so I can be alone with my dog
what is she LOOKING at even
why isn’t it me
Just enough Byron. “I will not make eye contact during this portrait sitting,” his contract reads. “You may only color in my mouth, so that people can make out with this painting of me.” End of contract.
Medium Byron, which is perhaps the least amount of Byron you can get. It’s better to be almost no Byron than just regular Byron, so this is actually zero Byrons. He’s almost smiling?? And like, reading letters , like someone with a job would do? Why don’t you just paint KEATS and DIE.
ALL POSSIBLE BYRONS. ONE BILLION PERCENT would Lord Byron grow a mustache and demand that everyone notice it. He would never come out and say “What do you think of my mustache?” but he would make it clear in a thousand small ways that you were expected to notice and compliment it, and if you withheld that pleasure from him, you would never be invited to dinner again. Lord Byron was the thirstiest man alive, but he always pretended he didn’t want anything to drink.
SEMI-Byron?? Obviously the lute and the laurel wreath and the funereal sheet draped like a Roman toga are mightily sick touches and whatnot, but you can’t even see his death erection, which I feel like would have been really important to him, that even in death people were thinking about and looking at his dick.
MOST BYRON. “Hello, are you Greece, I am here to run your army? Don’t worry, I’m a poet. Thank you for the gifts I assume are on their way.”
JUST MAKE IT LOOK LIKE I’M THINKING REAL FIERCELY
LIKE MY BRAIN IS TRYING TO FUCK THE SHIT OUT OF SOME THOUGHTS, OKAY
[Images via ]
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Byronic Heroes: Mad, Bad, and Dangerous To Know.
Lord Byron: Mad, Bad, and Delicate Mustachio.
His only legitimate daughter had to be raised by mathematicians in order to fight the influence of his wild blood!
http://sydneypadua.com/2dgoggles/lovelace-the-ori …
Chortling with glee over here right now.
Thank the Gods that I am safely ensconced in my office, hooting like a lunatic at this series. #byron4evah
Saaaame.
at the risk of having this become the one thing i talk about online, i v strongly recommend this article about byron's enbalmed penis. if you're, er, interested in that: http://blogs.forteana.org/node/147
also, i want to put all of these paintings on my wall. except the one where he's dying, probably.
"Look, I've been in the Army, I've been in bathhouses, I've seen men. But I never saw nothing like him." He stopped again, and nodding his head, meaningfully, as novelists say, began to tap a spot just above his knee. "He was built like a pony."
I don't know much about decomposition, but…a whole 114 years after Byron's death, his dick was intact and still capable of awing onlookers with its size? How does that work? What the hell kind of supernatural dick magic was he weaving here? "You can take my life, but you'll never take my boner! Lil Byron is hard enough to pierce through the veil of death!"
welll… it was embalmed! with fluid! that made it swell and kept it… that way.
It's explained at the end of the article. :)
Try and find a place here that I haven't put my penis in
Look, if this is the thing you talk about online, I think you've lived a good life.
I'm loving the image of embalmed penises "dancing in a stately sort of way", like a scene cut from a gruesome re-make of a Jane Asten novel.
Nodding ther little heads in the dark…
OH, MY GOD.
How did I not know about this?! Ten thousand thanks.
I want the mustache turban painting, mostly.
Why don’t you just paint KEATS and DIE.
Why not indeed. Definitely the spot where the uncontrollable laughter started.
His sickbed letters to Fanny Brawne were better than his poems. HOT TAKE.
That pedostache is an aberration, but I never fully realized before what a BABE Byron was. No wonder he's also my favourite Pike triplet.
Adam & Jordan were assholes
A+, would read comment again
::dies laughing:: Yeah I mean, if I HAD to pick a Pike, I guess it'd be Byron.
Welp. This is definitely going on the list of Things to Not Surreptitiously Read During a Meeting.
He's probably pissed that someone put him in a Pre-Raphaelite painting with The Pre-Raphaelite Woman. "Ain't fuckin' here to slum it in someone ELSE'S genre, Ford."
And speaking of the opening scene of "Bride Of Frankenstein" as we almost were: Elsa Lanchester FOREVER
Elsa Lanchester FOREVER AND EVER. Infinite Elsa Lanchester. (I am definitely the kind of person who will watch a movie just because she is in it, no matter how small the role.)
Might I recommend Blackbeard's Ghost ? Hard to find Disney live-action, with Elsa Lanchester as a DELIGHTFUL proprietor of the seaside inn where Blackbeard died. 10/10, would Elsa again.
Ooh, my library's got that.
I ADORED this movie when I was a kid! I haven't thought about it in years. Thanks for the reminder :)
Elsa Lanchester and I have the same birthday.
Her mission in this movie? Kill Hitler: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wIkV9_tH9DY
As you do.
"Why don't you just paint KEATS and DIE?"
My lunch-pita got entangled in my lungs, due to gasping laughter, so I nearly did, thank you.
I dressed as Lady Caroline Lamb dressing as #6 in grad school. For a party. Not just for Tuesday night Seminar: Romanticism, Aestheticism, and Eroticism or for teaching Comp 101.
That is NOT a faraway look, I am awaiting a sex pigeon.
I'm guessing you mean a sex (carrier) pigeon but I imagine Byron also would have been down with a Hatoful Boyfriend-type sitch.
I mean, this does sound like the kind of thing Byron would have said:
<img src=" http://venturebeat.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/09/hatofulboyfriend_nudefighting.png?w=558"> ;
I never thought i would see something from Hatoful Boyfriend on the Toast. What a meeting of the minds.
You are in good company! See @BourneApprox's Friday Gaming Thread on this particular Friday: /2014/09/19/cocktail-hour-ope …
Yes, Apollonia 6 is now in my head.
A Cloak Full of Dildos is my new band name.
He's dirty-sweet and he's your boy.
A cross reference to T. Rex? My day is made.
let's also read kate beaton, because kate beaton 4 everrrr: http://harkavagrant.com/index.php?id=56
<3 forever. Related: http://www.harkavagrant.com/index.php?id=319
AND EVER
Speaking of Canadians, of which she is one, and Gilbert Blythe, I gaze at Kate from afar. And giggle. And gaze. http://www.newyorker.com/culture/sarah-larson/jon …
that third panel may be my favorite thing kate beaton has ever done
I automatically think of it whenever anyone brings up Byron in any context, but I punctuate it a little more dirtbaggily in my mind:
ok, so
try to find a place here
that I haven't put my penis in
IT'S NOT EASY
same
And while we're posting Kate Beaton comics about Byron's effects on the ladies: http://www.harkavagrant.com/index.php?id=298
Was definitely going to post this. I randomly quote this cartoon at my husband just to confuse and entertain him. "I'm sad. Our baby died. I don't want to have sex with your friends."
Why no paintings of Byron killing the doggerel poet Ezra Chater in a duel??
You haven't established a duel was fought! You haven't established it was with Byron! For god's sake, Bernard, you haven't established that Byron was even here!
Look we've got the letters and be real IS IT CONCEIVABLE that the letters were in the book when Byron borrowed it?
So he must have borrowed the book, written the review, posted it, seduced Mrs. Chater, fought a duel and departed, all in the space of two or three days. Who would do that?
BYRON!
(I literally just clapped my hands in glee over this entire thread.)
OH MY GODDDDDDD THIS THREAD THIS THREAD YOU ARE ALL MY PEOPLE
the caption for the second one is PERFECT, SO PERFECT
I laughed so hard I wept.
I humbly request Lord Byron: SEXPOT DIRTBAG.
Please, deliver this unto me so that I can laughweep again.
The Real World: Villa Diodati!
TRUUUUUUE STORY
When poets stop being polite…and start being dirtbag.
Dirtbag Byron would only succeed in making him seem more respectable somehow.
"Who is #2 making me think of?" I wondered. Got it. Judy Gold.
Old School Judy Gold.
Would he be flattered?
"It's Georgie's SHOW-OOOW!"
(yeah, probably not flattered)
"Greek people! I wore your national costume! Are you not impressed?"
The ladies in the left of the painting are so not impressed. I love it.
"Why don't you paint KEATS and DIE?" is my new go-to insult.
And that is a lyre not a lute and you know it and stop trolling, Ortberg.
…insult, or new Toast shirt?
Oh please let this be a new shirt:
"And that is a lyre not a lute and you know it and stop trolling, Ortberg."
+1 would buy
Both?
So I was an English major but every now and then there's a post here that makes me realize there's a gaping hole in my knowledge. Like, this is funny to me in a general "know your Romantic poets" kind of way but CLEARLY there's some stuff I'm missing that makes the dick jokes even funnier.
I found Edna O'Brien's blessedly brief Byron in Love to be v. helpful.
I have learned more about Byron's penis today than I ever expected to know. I am now ashamed of my education, which has been revealed this day as woefully inadequate.
You know what would never be described as woefully inadequate?
Byron's penis.
HEYOOOO
"than I ever expected to know"
Note you didn't say "wanted".
Mmkay but I'm confused. The end of the article with the horrifying DISMEMBERED PENIS JAR (nightmares forever) seemed to say all ALL of them which had been injected with the embalming fluid were *huge*? And wasn't Byron injected full of all that stuff? So isn't it possible his legendary size was a post-mortem phenomenon?
#realdicktalk
(these are the kinds of things I get curious about that get me kicked out of polite establishments.)
But the dismembered penises were floating in jars full of embalming fluid, whereas Byron was injected with whatever amount and then buried. That dude said that "He was bone from the elbows to his hands and from the knees down" so clearly a lot of his flesh DID decompose. Just… not his dick. His dick is too powerful even for Death to conquer it.
"…his out-of-frame hand is probably jerking off the devil, because there’s some sort of flame situation going on in the lower right-hand corner."
His out-of-frame hand is definitely jerking off the devil, because it is Lord Byron, and what else is he supposed to do with his hands?
He's never not jerking off the devil. That was true during his life and it's certainly true now, assuming the existence of an afterlife.
Medium Byron may be only medium byronic, but as far as resemblance to Benedict Cumberbatch goes he's got the rest of them beat.
Cumberbatch playing Byron in some biopic would just be a couple of hours of pure fan service, as far as I can tell. I can't even imagine the fan fiction that could then ensue. Byron IS slash fiction, embodied.
You make an excellent point.
"You want homoerotic adventures? Deviant hetero sex? You want incest? You want orgies? You want drinking out of skulls? Here ya go."
YES YES I WANT THIS YES
Similarly, Byron #2 is just one Sam Smith-looking motherfucker with that hair and chin.
Why don’t you just paint KEATS and DIE.
Your wit scintillates, do you know that? It is the arc of the Galaxy on a clear desert night; the glimmering majesty of a crystal cavern; the phosphorescent moonglow of a tropical beach; the carpet after a My Little Pony – themed birthday party.
his brow situation is ferociously organized
Accurate.
Okay, am I the only Toastie who somehow grew up believing that Caspar David Friedrich's "Wanderer Above the Sea of Fog" was a portrait of Lord Byron? That's a misconception, right? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wanderer_above_the_S …
The timing works out, but he's got blond hair. Perhaps a Teutonic Byron wannabe? (Byronnabe?)
BYRONNABE
that is all
My reaction was "that man is a BLOND, Byron would never."
THERE WERE SO MANY BYRONNABES in the 19th century.
It's definitely the kind of portrait Byron would want of himself, though.
Byron would never want to have himself painted from behind, you could hardly see his dick at all from that angle.
Now wait a minute here, Byron had himself painted in a lot of ways, including: deep in thought, consumed by romantic passion, pouty, VERY pouty, with a dog, dead, and dressed as a Turk (twice), but he never had a portrait painted where you could see his dick.He might have been a selfish egomaniacal sex maniac, but he was also a gentleman, for goodness' sake.
This painting is on the cover of my copy of Frankenstein , so even if it is just a Byronnabe, it works. Somehow.
(I just like the painting, really.)
I have been waiting my entire life for someone to make righteous fun of that Ingres; the man had a profound gift for making lovely people so very punchable.
Don't you think he's about to drag Pre-Raphaelite girl's hand down into his lap, with her unknowing until she gets a handful of byron-weiner? I think that's what his expression is all about in that painting.
OK everyone, Fuck Marry Kill these paintings of Byron.
Fuck: Sketch Byron or jerking off the devil Byron
Marry: Dog Byron (mostly for the dog)
Kill: Roman Byron because that is a really lame painting.
"Kill: Roman Byron because that is a really lame painting."
Also, he's already dead, so you're ahead of the game.
I'm extremely lazy so this really works for me.
Man, but that guy was good at sitting for portraits.
I like how even in the regular one of him just sitting at a desk like a common rube he's wearing an amulet with a ruby the size of a duck's egg.
now what kind of man doesn't have a sitting ruby
i mean how do you SIT without your SITTING RUBY
how do one's letters open themselves if not by focusing one's sexual-poetic prowess through the ruby at one's throat
HARRRRRRRRUMPHHHHHHHHH
POLIDORI! I mean to glance at and then discard some letters from my admirers. Fetch me my sitting ruby! –Is it this one? Good god man, that is plainly a boating ruby –oh yes sorry here we go– Not the going-out ruby are you even LISTENING to me? –right I've got it here. … –it's not this one either is it Exactly how you've managed thirty years on this earth without knowing the difference between a sitting ruby and a picnic ruby is a mystery that will baffle historians for generations to come ASSUMING YOU EVEN MAKE IT INTO MY BIOGRAPHY.
DAMMIT BYRON I'M A DOCTOR, NOT A JEWELER. YOU'RE DRAINING THE LIFE FROM ME, LIKE- LIKE SOME KIND OF-
-john you're so obvious
-where's my emerald of disdain
-i can hardly be expected to wear a ruby in this state
Re #1: "Oh, and say, boy, IF YOU SURVIVE, come by my quarters later and I'll, uh, show you my SKULL CUP. Which is both a euphemism AND YET NOT." http://www.poets.org/poetsorg/poem/lines-inscribe …
I am totally distracted by the magnificence of the Greeks' skirts in that second to last one. Like, was this an Actual Thing that Greek men in the early 19th century wore magnificent skirts?
Also in that one Byron reminds me of Mr. Collins from P&P.
I am Greek and study Greek historical clothing and yes they did actually wear those skirts.
Totally a thing. The Greek President's guard (sort of like a palace guard) still wear them. To be chosen for the guard one needs to be tall and handsome. Those are the actual rules! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JtlvwblDQPY
Ohhhhh yesss. This is the premium content I come here for.
so I've been reading The Stress of Her Regard which features Byron as a character and I decided I wanted to be reminded what he looked like so this is TWO TIMES TODAY Lord Byron's just slightly unappealing face has entered my life
Someone ELSE is reading The Stress of Her Regard?!
18 weeks later: I'm a huge fan of Unknown Armies, which is a tabletop RPG inspired by Tim Powers' Last Call (to the point I'd recommend reading Unknown Armies first, and everyone should read UA, even if they don't like RPGs, because it's actually -fun to read,- like a good novel). I got turned on to Tim Powers about, oh, 18 weeks ago, and while Last Call was great…didn't so much like The Stress or Declare. or Three Days to Never, although I disliked that less.
Don't you worry, those letters he's reading are so scandalous they're going to be burned after his death and his replies will be a thousand times more so (more scandalous, not more burned, probably the same amount of burned)
"Cloak Full of Dildos": the name of my new thrash metal band.
"Why don’t you just paint KEATS and DIE."
There is no word in this that isn't perfect. This should be on every university English Department syllabus.
This made me laugh-snort at my desk far too much — and I'm reasonably sure the fact that they are actually NOT in order is part of the joke, but I am also a little too anal to get that part. Maybe that should be one of the tags next time, e.g., #actually not in order which is part of the joke people that are a little too anal to get it
"18 ascots" is my favorite phrase.
I'm just sad Byron was born too early to be the lead singer of a really intense goth band that broke up just as their second album was becoming known.
I'm not saying this is the -wrong- title-, Mallory, but you could have use "lordbyronity".