Robert Southey (1774–1843)

Phillips's portrait of Robert Southey from 1818 depicts the Poet Laureate and close friend of Coleridge and Wordsworth at the height of his official recognition—the year when his reputation as a major literary figure was secure despite the attacks of Byron and the Romantics who dismissed him as a Tory apostate. Southey had been a youthful radical who became a conservative government supporter, and his Laureateship brought him both official recognition and the contempt of the younger Romantic generation. Phillips's portraits of the Lake Poets—Coleridge (1818), Southey (1818), and Wordsworth (1805)—created a visual document of the founding generation of English Romanticism that was reproduced through engraving to a wide public audience.

The poet's features are rendered with careful attention to his distinctive physiognomy, while the warm palette and restrained composition create an image of literary authority and personal dignity.