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Thomas Carlyle

Chapter 5: NOTE ON SOME PORTRAITS OF THOMAS CARLYLE.
By G. K. Chesterton
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About This Book

An illustrated biography traces the life and mind of Thomas Carlyle, following his rural origins, intellectual development, and literary career while exploring the recurring tension between rationalist systems and more intuitive, visionary impulses. The authors combine chronological narrative with critical commentary, letters, and portraits, documenting key residences, personal relationships, and compositional habits alongside summaries of major works and stylistic traits. Anecdote and analysis are balanced to present a compact portrait of a complex public figure whose prose, temperament, and ideas shaped contemporary debates.

THOMAS CARLYLE

NOTE ON SOME
PORTRAITS OF THOMAS CARLYLE.

From a portrait by Daniel Maclise, R.A.

see page 5

This portrait is now in the Victoria and Albert Museum. “Carlyle,” writes David Hannay in the Magazine of Art, “already the author of Sartor Resartus, stands leaning against the traditional pillar with the conventional air of colourless good breeding. There is neither line in his face nor light in his eye.”

From a sketch by Count D’Orsay (1839)

see page 7

“He (D’Orsay) has contrived,” says the same writer, “to make Carlyle look like the hero of a lady’s novel—an excellent young man with a curl in his upper lip and a well-combed head of hair.”

From Sir J. E. Boehm’s gold medallion

see page 15

The medallion has been reproduced from a wood engraving by Pearson. It was presented to Carlyle in 1875, on his eightieth birthday, by friends and admirers in Edinburgh.

From a drawing by E. J. Sullivan

see page 24

“Professor Diogenes Teufelsdröckh, of Weissnichtwo, is nothing if he is not Carlyle in disguise, the projection of the Scotchman’s individuality upon a half-humorous, half-philosophical German background.”—Ernest Rhys: Introductory Note to Sartor Resartus.

From the painting by J. McNeill Whistler

see page 13

“Mr. Whistler, in the Glasgow Corporation Art Galleries, has distinctly succeeded in making the face of Carlyle interesting. He has avoided anything like exaggeration. He has not tried to make capital out of the rugged mass of the hair, or to give a wild-man-of-the-woods look to the face by laying stress on its deep lines and stern contours. The head is noble, quiet, and sad. The artist has tried to paint a serious portrait rather than to give a ‘view,’ and he has succeeded.”—David Hannay in the Magazine of Art.

From the painting by G. F. Watts, R.A., act. 73

see page 30

This portrait, executed for John Forster, who was very pleased with it, is now in the National Portrait Gallery. Carlyle himself describes it as “a delirious-looking mountebank, full of violence, awkwardness, atrocity, and stupidity, without recognisable likeness to anything I have ever known in any feature of me. Fait in fatis. What care I, after all? Forster is much content.”

From the portrait painted by Sir J. E. Millais, P.R.A.

see page 29

The picture by Millais, also in the National Portrait Gallery, was painted in 1877 for Mr. J. A. Froude. His opinion of it was as follows:—“And yet under Millais’s hands the old Carlyle stood again upon the canvas as I had not seen him for thirty years. The inner secret of the features had been evidently caught. There was a likeness which no sculptor, no photographer, had yet equalled or approached. Afterwards, I knew not how, it seemed to fade away. Millais grew dissatisfied with his work, and, I believe, never completed it.”

From a statue by Sir J. E. Boehm, R.A.

see page 35

In the gardens on the Chelsea Embankment stands a statue of Thomas Carlyle in bronze by the late Sir Edgar Boehm, which was placed there by subscription in 1882. Mr. Froude considered it “as satisfactory a likeness in face and figure as could be rendered in sculpture; and the warm regard which had grown up between the artist and Carlyle had enabled Boehm to catch with more than common success the shifting changes of his expression.”