The Creative Exchange between Wordsworth and Beaumont

This study offers a biography of the friendship between Wordsworth and Beaumont, exploring Lady Beaumont’s role in generating an inter-familial relationship of heartfelt sympathy. It also offers detailed analysis of key poems and paintings that resulted from their artistic exchange: the first section offers a new reading of ‘Elegiac Stanzas’, placing the poem in the context of a series of letters that channel a discussion of hope and aspiration through Sir Joshua Reynolds’s theory of ‘Ideal Form’; the second focuses on the paintings Beaumont produced to accompany Wordsworth’s poetry, situating them within early nineteenth-century debates about the Sister Arts; the third examines Beaumont’s fascination with a passage from The Excursion, arguing that its composition was inflected by a painting in Beaumont’s collection, Peter Paul Rubens’s Autumn Landscape. The study concludes with an exploration of the principles that underpinned Beaumont’s campaign for a National Gallery.