Louis Édouard Fournier’s The Funeral of Shelley is one of those historical paintings that has become more famous than the event it supposedly records. Painted in 1889, nearly seventy years after Percy Bysshe Shelley’s death, it shows the poet’s body burning on a lonely Italian beach while a small group of friends stands solemnly nearby.
It is an extraordinarily effective image: bleak, mournful and theatrical. It is also, in several important respects, quite wrong.
Fournier was not really attempting to provide a documentary reconstruction. He was creating a Romantic image of the death of a Romantic poet, and in doing so he helped turn what was already a dramatic episode into a legend.
Who Was Percy Bysshe Shelley?
Percy Bysshe Shelley was one of the major poets of the English Romantic movement, a contemporary and friend of Lord Byron and John Keats. Born in Sussex in 1792 into a wealthy landed family, he seemed destined for a conventional life in the English upper classes. Instead, he became one of the most radical literary figures of his generation. An atheist, a republican and an outspoken opponent of established political and religious authority, he was expelled from Oxford after publishing The Necessity of Atheism, and his unconventional private life caused almost as much scandal as his politics.
His reputation today rests on poems including Ozymandias, Ode to the West Wind, To a Skylark and the great lyrical drama Prometheus Unbound. Shelley believed that poetry had the power to transform human consciousness and, ultimately, society itself. His politics and his verse were closely connected: liberty, rebellion, imagination and opposition to tyranny recur throughout his work.
Yet Shelley was still only twenty-nine when he died. Much of the fame that surrounds him therefore belongs not only to the poems he wrote, but to his image as a doomed young Romantic poet.
Why Was Shelley Living in Italy?
Shelley and his wife Mary (later famous as the author of Frankenstein) left England for Italy in March 1818 and never returned. There were several reasons for the move. Shelley suffered from poor health and hoped that the warmer climate would help him. The couple also faced financial pressures and considerable hostility in Britain because of Shelley’s radical politics and unconventional personal life. One immediate practical reason for the journey was to take Claire Clairmont’s daughter Allegra to her father, Lord Byron, who was then living in Italy.
Italy soon became much more than a refuge. For Shelley it was a landscape of classical history, spectacular scenery and comparative personal freedom. During his four Italian years he lived or stayed in Venice, Rome, Naples, Florence and Pisa, and produced some of his greatest work.
By the spring of 1822, Percy and Mary Shelley had rented Casa Magni at San Terenzo, near Lerici on the Gulf of La Spezia. At the time it stood almost directly above the sea and was far more isolated than it appears today. The wildness of the setting was part of its attraction. Shelley was also increasingly drawn to sailing – not necessarily a sensible enthusiasm, since he was not an experienced sailor and could not swim.
The Fatal Voyage
In July 1822 Shelley sailed south to Livorno with his friend Edward Williams. He had gone there partly to meet Leigh Hunt, who had recently arrived in Italy, and to discuss the new political and literary periodical The Liberal, a project involving Hunt and Byron as well as Shelley.
On 8 July, Shelley, Williams and a young crewman set out on the return voyage towards Lerici in Shelley’s small sailing boat, the Don Juan. But a violent storm sprang up in the Gulf of la Spezia, and the boat never reached home.
Precisely what happened has been argued about ever since. The vessel may have been badly designed, the crew may have handled her poorly, or a combination of the two may have proved fatal. More exotic theories involving pirates or political assassination have also circulated, but there is no compelling evidence for them. What is certain is that Shelley, Williams and the boatman all drowned.
Shelley’s body washed ashore near Viareggio about ten days later. It had been in the sea too long to be identified by appearance. Edward Trelawny, the adventurer and friend who later became one of the principal chroniclers of Shelley’s final days, identified him from his clothing and possessions, including a volume of Keats that was found in his pocket.
To comply with local sanitary regulations, the bodies were initially buried in the sand. Permission was eventually obtained for Shelley’s remains to be cremated on the beach before the ashes were taken away, to be buried in the Protestant Cemetery in Rome.
It is this cremation that Fournier transformed into his famous painting.
The Picture — and What Really Happened
Fournier presents an almost perfectly staged Romantic tragedy. Shelley lies upon the burning pyre; the sea and sky are grey; the figures are dressed in dark, heavy clothing. Three of Shelley’s friends stand near the flames: Edward Trelawny on the left, Leigh Hunt in the middle and Lord Byron on the right. Mary Shelley can be seen kneeling further back.
Some of this is historically sound. Shelley really was cremated on the beach near Viareggio, and Trelawny, Hunt and Byron were all associated with the ceremony. Fournier also drew upon the published recollections of Trelawny, whose account did much to shape the later mythology of Shelley’s death.
But almost everything about the mood of the scene has been altered.
Most obviously, it was not a cold grey day, since Shelley’s cremation took place in the oppressive heat of an Italian August. Fournier knew this, since Trelawney had described the conditions in his memoir, but deliberately substituted a bleak, wintry atmosphere because it better suited the emotional effect he wanted to achieve.
The mourners are equally misleading.
Mary Shelley was not present at the cremation. Fournier nevertheless placed the grieving widow in the scene because a bereaved wife kneeling beside her husband’s funeral pyre is far more emotionally powerful than historical absence. Leigh Hunt was there, but according to Trelawny he remained in the carriage rather than standing beside the pyre as Fournier shows him. As for Lord Byron, he did not remain posed heroically before the flames. Disturbed by the sight and suffering in the intense heat, he withdrew and went swimming in the sea.
And Shelley himself would certainly not have looked as Fournier depicts him. In the painting, the poet’s face is recognisable and he lies serenely upon the fire, as though asleep. The reality was far harsher. His body had spent many days in the sea and was badly decomposed before its recovery. And there is another difference. The cremation was not simply a picturesque heap of driftwood; Trelawny had arranged a substantial iron apparatus upon which the body could be burnt. Oils and other materials were used to sustain the fire, and Trelawny later embellished the event with imagery suggestive of a classical or pagan funeral rite.
That classical association mattered. Shelley himself had been fascinated by the ancient world, and to later admirers, his cremation on a Mediterranean shore seemed uncannily appropriate: the rebellious poet consumed by fire beside the sea, surrounded by fellow writers.
Painting the Legend Rather Than the Event
This is what makes The Funeral of Shelley so interesting. Its inaccuracies are not accidental mistakes. They reveal exactly what Fournier wanted his audience to feel. Painted in 1889, the picture belongs not to Shelley’s own Romantic generation but to the later nineteenth century, by which time Shelley had become a cultural icon. The controversial atheist and political radical had gradually been transformed into the ethereal, doomed young poet familiar to Victorian readers.
The grey sky, the empty beach, the black coats and the motionless mourners turn an awkward and gruesome cremation into a solemn secular martyrdom. Mary becomes the archetypal grieving widow. Byron and Hunt become witnesses. Shelley himself remains physically beautiful even in death.
None of it is quite true, yet the painting conveys something that a strictly accurate reconstruction perhaps could not: the extraordinary effect Shelley’s death had upon his friends and upon his subsequent reputation.
The real event took place beneath a blazing August sun, involved a badly decomposed body, an improvised cremation apparatus and mourners who behaved considerably less theatrically than Fournier suggests.
The imagined version has proven far more durable.
And that may be the final irony of The Funeral of Shelley. A poet who spent his life insisting upon the transformative power of imagination was, after his death, transformed by imagination himself.
Anthony R Wildman 