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This monumental and historically important portrait by Sir George Hayter shows The Hon. William Lamb (later 2nd Viscount Melbourne), one of the most prominent political figures of the late-Georgian and early-Victorian ages. In many ways, this portrait is a study in the nature of holding public office in the mid-nineteenth century. His face illuminated by light falling from the upper right of the picture, Melbourne is shown as though on the verge of spouting, as if taken by some oratorical inspiration. Wearing the clothes of a professional rather than the ceremonial robes of state, Hayter depicts Melbourne in the guise of a citizen prime minister for the industrial age – a servant of the state and of his queen. This impression is reinforced by the presence both of the sheaves of paper that spill off the desk, and of the red despatch box. One telling detail is the name that is emblazoned on the lid of this ministerial box: Victoria.

Melbourne, who was Victoria’s first prime minister, had a far closer relationship to the queen than was typical of that between monarch and prime minister. Aged only eighteen when she acceded the throne and unmarried, Victoria depended on Melbourne as a sympathetic, quasi-paternal mentor who could introduce her to the demands of politics and guide her through the labyrinthine offices of state. The feeling was mutual. Melbourne, whose marriage had spectacularly and publically collapsed earlier in his life, found solace in his emotional proximity to the Queen. This attachment might not for Melbourne have been entirely platonic. Still possessed of his famed good looks – as is attested by the present portrait – it seems likely that Melbourne hoped against hope that Victoria might have considered him to be a worthy suitor and husband. Certainly, this was not lost on the public, many of whom would jokingly refer to the Queen as Mrs Melbourne. However, Victoria’s marriage to Prince Albert in 1840 eventually put paid to this speculation, and to Melbourne’s emotional closeness to the queen. By this point, the strains of office had begun to take a visible toll on the prime minister, meaning that he was secretly overjoyed to retire from public life following his final election defeat in 1844. Yet, Victoria never forgot Melbourne’s loyal and discreet service, writing in her diary of her distress at his defeat, ‘that happy peaceful life destroyed, that dearest kind Lord Melbourne no more my minister’.

The son of a renowned miniaturist, George rowed with his father when it became apparent that he wished to study anatomy and large-scale academic painting at the Royal Academy Schools. Fiery of temperament, Hayter vented his frustration by running away from home to join the navy. When his penitent father freed the young artist from his naval bonds, George returned home only to fall in love with his father’s lodger when he was aged only sixteen and she twenty-eight. This was formalised by a clandestine marriage in London. When this became public, Hayter was undeterred and fathered a series of children with his wife. At the same time, Hayter was establishing his career. Thanks to the encouragement of Academy figures such as Benjamin West and Henry Fuseli, who sagely prophesied that ‘in all you’ll shine, and in [painting], you’ll soar’, Hayter continued his studies and in 1814, aged twenty-two, painted two miniatures – of Lady Jane Montague and Anne Isabella Millbanke (later Lady Byron) – that caught the attention of Princess Charlotte, next in line to the throne, thereby launching his career.

Hayter moved to Italy, where he was made an honorary member of the Accademia di San Luca (a post that the English Royal Academy never bestowed on the artist). However, in 1827, his time in Italy was cut short when his mistress arrived from Paris and killed herself with arsenic (the apparently unintentional consequence of a plea for attention). Florentine society was appalled and Hayter banished; although, in testament to his skill, the aesthetical Florentines still saw fit to ask Hayter to submit a self-portrait for the famed Vasari Corridor in the Uffizi Museum. Following a stint in Paris, Hayter returned to England where he hoped to step into the void that had been left following the death of Sir Thomas Lawrence in 1830. In 1833 – perhaps inspired by the success of his 1820-23 group portrait of the Trial of Queen Caroline – Hayter was inspired to paint an enormous group painting of the momentous first session of the House of Commons to discuss the Great Reform Act. The following painting, the most ambitious British political portrait still to this day still, required the execution of almost four hundred head studies, and consumed Hayter for the following ten years. It is now in the National Portrait gallery. Before this monumental group portrait had been completed, Hayter had succeeded in using the favour that he had accrued from the present 1838 portrait to successfully lobied Melbourne to become the principal painter in ordinary to the Queen, stealing it from under the nose of President of the Royal Academy, Sir Martin Archer Shee.