Edward George Earle Lytton Bulwer Lytton (1803–1873), 1st Baron Lytton

This portrait of Edward Bulwer-Lytton, the enormously popular novelist whose books dominated the Victorian fiction market, was painted around 1838 when he was at the peak of his literary fame. Bulwer-Lytton's novels — The Last Days of Pompeii, Eugene Aram, Rienzi — combined historical spectacle with Romantic psychology in a formula that made him the most commercially successful English novelist of the 1830s. Maclise moved in the same metropolitan literary and social circles as Bulwer-Lytton, and his portraits of writers and cultural figures form an important documentary record of early Victorian intellectual life. The portrait's quality reflects Maclise's technical gifts that were available to those within his social world.

The portrait captures the novelist's aristocratic bearing with Maclise's precise drawing and careful attention to costume, reflecting both the sitter's social position and the artist's own meticulous working method.