Modeled at the turn of the century, the present model is from a series of portraits of British and American authors which included Keats, Scott, Shelley, Milton, Burns, Whitman, etc. It shows the style of modeling adopted by the artist at this time in which the features of the sitter are carefully defined, but the surrounding hair and clothing are left fairly rough. Beside the marble in the Lyceum Theater, London, there exist several other examples of the Tennyson portrait in bronze, plaster and marble.