To view all current artworks for sale visit philipmould.com


This portrait, which has recently emerged from an English private collection, shows William Lamb, later 2nd Viscount Melbourne, who is best known in popular history for his role in mentoring the young Queen Victoria during the early years of her reign.

Lamb is portrayed here by Henry William Pickersgill, one of the leading society portrait painters of the mid-19th century. Pickersgill, like his predecessor Sir Thomas Lawrence, had an unmistakeable ability to capture not only his subject’s physical likeness, but glimpses of their character too. Lamb, a formidable orator, is thus portrayed in an authoritative upright manner, gazing confidentially away from the view as if caught off-guard and mid flow. Within the context of Lamb’s painted iconography - the bulk of which can be dated to after 1834 when he was made prime minister - this portrait can be considered one of his most engaging likenesses. In the later portraits, for example, Lamb is shown as a senior statesman, often seated in an altogether more formal Victorian manner.

Born into the highest strata of Whig Society, William Lamb, later the 2nd Viscount Melbourne, was always destined for high office. Following his education at Eton and Cambridge, Melbourne was sent to Scotland where he drank deep from the fount of the Scottish Enlightenment. Tall, handsome, well-read and a scintillating conversationalist, upon returning to London Melbourne quickly became a linchpin of the Devonshire Set – that potpourri of the greatest Whig intellectuals – melting the hearts of many of its female members in the process. Despite his popularity, Melbourne never quite subscribed to the famously unconventional social mores of the Devonshires, maintaining a reserve that was to serve him well in later life.

It was perhaps just as well as his relationships with women later became a source of lifelong calamity and public humiliation. His marriage in 1805 to Caroline Ponsonby, the daughter of Lady Bessborough, one of the regulars at Devonshire House, was nothing short of a disaster. Further pressure was placed on the marriage by Lady Melbourne’s serial and public infidelities, including a scandalous liaison with the infamous philanderer Lord Byron, who was in her immortal words a man who was ‘mad, bad, and dangerous to know’. When the marriage finally ended in 1825, the enraged – and by this point mentally unstable – Lady Melbourne lashed out at the society that had excluded her by publishing Glenarvon, a gothic kiss-and-tell novel in which many of the secrets of high society were laid bare in thinly-fictionalised and scandalously-readable form. Jaded and humiliated, Melbourne exacted his emotional revenge by himself embarking on affairs with married women which, although he managed to succeed in keeping them from the public gaze, were made even more scandalous by the Viscount’s predilection for what one historian has bluntly termed ‘spanking sessions with aristocratic ladies’.

Melbourne disguised the emotional turmoil of his private life beneath a carefully-constructed façade of languorous-impassivity, which became one of his strongest assets. Drawn naturally to the centre ground in politics, Melbourne approached the most significant events of his day with a blend of reserve and detachedness that was steadied by an underlying pragmatism. These qualities were to provide the catalyst for his appointment as Prime Minister. When following the resignation of Lord Grey, Whig grandees decided to approach Melbourne in 1834 to take up the office of premier it was, as one of them remarked, because he was ‘the only one of whom none of us would be jealous’. Melbourne initially declined, exclaiming with his typical languor that ‘I think it’s be a damned bore’, before finally relenting with little enthusiasm.

When Queen Victoria came to the throne in 1837, Melbourne’s even-headedness again proved its value. Commanding yet grandfatherly and still possessed of his good looks, Victoria found in Melbourne a sympathetic mentor who could introduce her to the demands of politics and guide her through the labyrinthine offices of state. The two became increasingly attached to each other, to the point that for a brief period Victoria became known as Mrs Melbourne.

However, political demands were eventually to take their toll on Melbourne. Beleaguered following the Bedchamber Crisis of 1839, Melbourne’s good looks began to fade with the demands of his office and an increasing corpulence brought on by a predilection for good-living. Following Victoria’s marriage to Prince Albert in 1840, Melbourne’s emotional proximity to the queen began to diminish and he began to seek the repose of retirement. Prevented from resigning due to political concerns, this was eventually granted following an election defeat in 1841 (at which Melbourne was secretly overjoyed), after which he moved to the family seat in Hertfordshire, where he died in 1848.

Although various sources state this portrait was painted in 1834, the same year Melbourne was made prime minister, this seems unlikely, and it was instead probably painted sometime between 1810 and 1820.