LONDON, ENGLAND.- The National Portrait Gallery presents "Mad, Bad and Dangerous- The Cult of Lord Byron," on view through February 16, 2003. This exhibition reinterprets the continuing fascination of Lord Byron (1788-1824) for a new generation. It explores how Byron’s literary fame and social notoriety was fuelled by the many visual representations of the poet, and goes on to examine his influence on leading figures of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries including Benjamin Disraeli, Oscar Wilde, T.E. Lawrence and W.H Auden as well as the more recent stars of popular culture such as James Dean, Rudolf Valentino and Mick Jagger. Byron was the forerunner of the modern art of self-presentation, and involved in the manipulation of his image. The exhibition brings together over 100 works including paintings, photographs, letters, literary manuscripts, memorabilia and examples of Byronic dress.

George Gordon Noel Byron, 6th Baron Byron was by far the most publicly visible of the British Romantic poets - a contemporary of Shelley and Keats. A legend throughout Europe in his own lifetime, Byron was famous for his good looks and his brilliant, reckless personality. A poet of travel and romance, and a scintillating satirist, he lived abroad from 1816 in self-imposed exile and died of fever at Missolonghi where he had joined the Greeks in their fight against Turkish rule.

Mad, Bad and Dangerous opens with contemporary portraits of Byron. In his years of fame in London numerous portraits were made of him, but most notably those by George Sanders (1807-8), Richard Westall (1813) two portraits by Thomas Phillips (1814), George Henry Harlow (c1815) and a marble bust by Bertel Thorwaldsen (1817). The wide dissemination of Byron’s portraits as engravings, medals and memorabilia made his handsome and self-consciously melancholy features immediately recognizable. He became the central visual image of the Romantic movement, and the way he was depicted set a new style in nineteenth-century portraiture.

Born in London in 1788, Byron spent his first ten years in Aberdeen with his mother. Much of his childhood was made unhappy by unsuccessful attempts to cure a deformed foot, of which he remained painfully conscious throughout his life. He inherited his title in 1798 and went to live at Newstead Abbey, the family home in Nottinghamshire, before attending Harrow and then Trinity College, Cambridge. He embarked on a number of love affairs with adolescent boys. In 1809, Byron published the satirical English Bards and Scotch Reviewers, but it was not until 1812, after he had spent two years traveling through Spain, Malta, Albania, Greece and Turkey, that he achieved real celebrity. That year he published Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage and, he said, "awoke to find myself famous". Two years later The Corsair sold an unprecedented 10,000 copies on the day of publication.

Over the next few years Byron published a succession of Oriental tales and was the toast of London society. He had a scandalous affair with Lady Caroline Lamb, and in 1815 married Anabella Millbank. A year later the marriage collapsed following his wife’s complaints about his dark moods of cruelty and despair and conjecture about his incestuous relationship with his half-sister Augusta Leigh. There were rumors of sodomy, then a crime punishable by death. Ostracized by many of his former admirers Byron left England for Switzerland, where he befriended fellow poet Percy Bysshe Shelley, and then Italy where he lived a life of dissipation and promiscuous love affairs in Venice before moving to Ravenna and then Pisa with his Italian mistress Countess Teresa Guiccioli.

In 1823, Byron’s interest in the cause of freeing Greece from Turkish rule led him to join the Greek revolutionaries fighting the Turks and he died of a fever in Missolonghi the following year at the early age of 36. During his final years he wrote his greatest poetry including Beppo (1818), The Vision of Judgement (1822) and, most notably, Don Juan (1819-24), an extraordinary medley of satire, adventure, and self-revelation which remained unfinished at his death.

Following his death, Byron was invested with an almost mythic quality. He was admired and emulated widely in Britain in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries by people right across the cultural and political spectrum: Dante Gabriel Rossetti and Edward Bulwer-Lytton, Wilfrid Scawen Blunt and TE Lawrence, Sir Oswald Mosley, Sir Harold Nicolson and Michael Foot. Oscar Wilde was very conscious of his link with Byron - both were ostracized for what was seen as sexual deviation.

The exhibition looks closely at the way "Byronism"(a term already in use during Byron’s lifetime) has impinged upon the self-image of the writer in particular - ranging from Tennyson and Baudelaire to Ted Hughes and Martin Amis.

The glamour of his personality and the iconoclasm of Byron’s political and religious views always made him a focus for dissident youth. More recently Byronism has had its counterpart in the film-stars, rock-stars and charismatic revolutionary heroes of the 20th century including Rudolph Valentino (the cinematic reincarnation of Byron’s Corsair), James Dean, Mick Jagger and Che Guevara, whose fame was spread through photographs, posters, film and television. Byron’s subversive personality has been recreated in some notable film and theatre performances by Richard Chamberlain, David Essex, Gabriel Byrne and Hugh Grant. Almost two centuries after his death, Byron lives on in the popular imagination.