LAWRENCE, Sir Thomas

Sir Thomas Lawrence was a very successful portraitist both in Britain and mainland Europe. Considered a child prodigy, he painted portraits from a very young age and at the age of 22, following the death of Joshua Reynolds, was appointed painter to the King, further adding to his prestige. He was commissioned by George IV to paint numerous politicians and European statesmen, portraits which were highly prized by the English and European aristocracy.

John Fane, 10th Earl of Westmorland (1759-1841) was a British Tory politician of the late 18th and early 19th centuries, who served in most of the cabinets of the period, primarily as Lord Privy Seal.

Famed for her looks and accomplishments, Lady Blessington presided over a literary salon at Gore House, Kensington. This portrait is said to be one of Lawrence’s finest characterizations.

This portrait is one of Lawrence’s masterpieces and depicts, together with his wife, one of the founders of Lloyds insurance market. He was a great collector and the purchase in 1828 of his collection formed the nucleus of paintings for the National Gallery in London. The Portrait of the Children of John Angerstein, a painting also in the Louvre, are the young children of this couple.

Pius VII (1742-1823) was the most famous Pope of the nineteenth century; he was also the most widely recognised man in that century, apart from Napoleon I. Born Luigi Barnaba Chiaramonti, he was elected Pope in 1800. Although he was present at Napoleon’s coronation in Paris in 1801, Pius VII later excommunicated him and was captured by the French three years later and held at Fontainebleau until 1814. He is noted for his essentially passive resistance to the French emperor, epitomised by the Concordat of 1801 between France and the Papacy, but it was nonetheless a policy that was tenaciously and effectively pursued. After the final defeat of Napoleon in 1815, Pius VII was identified with the emerging nationalist movement in Italy - the Risorgimento - and the renewal of Catholicism in Europe. By concentrating on restoring the buildings of Rome and by consolidating the famous collections in the city so recently pillaged by Napoleon, Pius VII enabled Rome to become the spiritual and cultural capital of Europe.

Lawrence was commissioned to paint the Pope by George IV, when still Prince Regent, as part of a series of portraits of those European heads of state, soldiers and diplomats associated with the downfall of Napoleon. The project was begun by Lawrence in 1814, but the twenty-five or so portraits preoccupied him for the rest of his life and, indeed, some remained unfinished at his death.

Lawrence travelled extensively in Europe - to Aix-la- Chapelle, Vienna and Rome - in order to obtain sittings for the portraits. He was in Rome from May to December 1819, staying in the Quirinal Palace, and between 18 May and 21 September he painted Pius VII and his personal adviser, Ercole, Cardinal Consalvi.

Pope Pius VII has every reason to be called Lawrence’s masterpiece and it was recognised as such during the artist’s lifetime. Lawrence wrote on 25 June 1819, ‘No picture that I have painted has been more popular with the friends of its subject, and the public … and, according to my scale of ability, I have executed my intention: having given him that expression of unaffected benevolence and worth, which lights up his countenance with a freshness and spirit, entirely free (except in the characteristic paleness of his complexion) from that appearance of illness and decay that he generally has when enduring the fatigue of his public functions.’

Pius VII is shown on the papal throne, or sedia gestatoria, on which he was carried in procession. His coat-of-arms with his motto PAX are visible on the finials of the throne. He holds a paper in his left hand marked Per/Anto. Canova, who was appointed Prefect of the Fine Arts in Rome by Pius VII and created Marchese d’lschia. In the background on the left is a view of the unfinished Braccio Nuovo, built to house some of the finest antiquities in the Vatican collections - the Apollo Belvedere, the Laoco�n and the Torso Belvedere are visible. The setting is, therefore, as important as the characterisation, but above all there is the sheer brilliance of Lawrence’s sense of colour and brushwork, as, for example, in the depiction of the pope’s hands or his slippers raised on the stool.

The significance of this portrait of Pius VII is only fully grasped if it is appreciated that Lawrence was working in a well-established tradition extending from the portraits of Julius II by Raphael (London, National Gallery), Paul III by Titian (Naples, Capodimonte) and Innocent X by Vel�zquez (Rome, Doria Pamphilj). Lawrence was not overwhelmed by these inevitable comparisons and his achievement is such that he can be accorded a prominent place alongside these outstanding portrait painters.

Alexander I of Russia (1777-1825) served as Emperor of Russia from 23 March 1801 to 1 December 1825 and Ruler of Poland from 1815 to 1825, as well as the first Grand Duke of Finland.

Lawrence depicts the young Anne Caulfeild (n�e Bermingham) (d. 1876) with her first child, James. Lady Charlemont was a celebrated beauty - Byron enthused that a portrait bust of her surpassed the famous Medici Venus.

The painting was cut down from its original format, which originally included the figure of Francis William, 2nd Earl of Charlemont, the husband and father of the sitters here.

This portrait dates from the artist’s late period and looks back to the English portrait tradition of the 17th and 18th centuries, when England was a leading centre for the genre. The use of a landscape background was characteristic of the English school. At the same time, the portrait also falls within the Romantic tradition in the elegant bearing of the sitter and in his expression, at once haughty and melancholy, while the clothing, pose and long untidy hair are all typical of the 19th-century dandy.

Prince Klemens Wenzel von Metternich (1773-1859) was a German-Austrian politician and statesman and was one of the most important diplomats of his era. He was a major figure in the negotiations before and during the Congress of Vienna and is considered both a paradigm of foreign-policy management and a major figure in the development of diplomatic praxis.

Nature is merely the backdrop for this carefully rehearsed performance. Although the lady is just putting the tuning key to her harp, the picture is almost static. The scattered accents of colour, such as red, seem to act as a counterpoint to her balanced pose. The harp and part of the stone socle may be intended as bearers of elegiac atmosphere, but first and foremost they are stabilizing compositional elements. Sentimentality and Neoclassicism are found hand in hand here. A clear and stringent compositional architecture is hidden behind an air of dreamy softness. The concept of the experienced portraitist is cloaked in the guise of chance inspiration.

Lady Georgina North (d. 1836) was the third daughter of the 3rd Earl of Guilford and sat for Lawrence on three different occasions. The present portrait was the last of the three portraits and was painted in 1828, towards the end of the artist’s life.

In this painting, Lawrence shows how an individual portrait of little Master Ainslie can become a decorative mise en scene of the concept of perfect beauty.

Thomas Lister, 1st Baron Ribblesdale (1752-1826) served as Member of Parliament for Clitheroe from 1773 to 1790. In 1775, at the outbreak of the American War of Independence he fitted out a frigate at his own expense which he placed at the disposal of the Government, and in 1779 fitted out a regiment of light horse called Lister’s Light Dragoons and gazetted a Major in the army.

The painting was originally intended to be one of a pair, together with a portrait of the sitter’s wife.

This full-length portrait depicts Anne, Viscountess Pollington (later countess of Mexborough) with her eldest son John, later 4th Earl of Mexborough. During the first decade of the 19th century, Lawrence focused much of his attention on the full-length group portrait, especially that of mothers and their offspring.

The double portrait of the parents, Mr and Mrs John Julius Angerstein, is also in the Louvre.

The youngest of five children of somewhat improvident parents, Lawrence was an infant prodigy. At ten he was drawing profile likenesses of the clients of his father’s inn at Devizes, and it was assumed early on that his talent for portraiture would support his family. Around 1787 he was brought to London by his father, began to paint in oils and to show at the Royal Academy. His fame as a painter of full-length portraits in oil was sealed at the Academy exhibition of 1790, which included, among a varied group of a dozen pictures by him, this masterly likeness of Queen Charlotte. Praised outside the royal family, the picture was never acquired by them, perhaps because the king was upset by the queen having posed bareheaded after Lawrence disliked the bonnet and hat she had chosen to wear. The queen herself found the 20-year old artist ‘rather presuming’ when he asked her to talk during the sitting, in an effort to animate her features. Eventually it was the Assistant Keeper of her Wardrobe who completed the sittings for such details as the bracelets bearing a portrait miniature of the king and his cipher.

Lawrence, a draughtsman of extreme precision, worked very hard at the ‘appearance of facility’. His dazzling brushwork, inspired by Rubens, Van Dyck, Rembrandt and Titian, enabled him to enjoy painting draperies, unlike his ageing ‘rival’ Reynolds, who often left them to assistants. But there is more to admire here beside the rustling shimmer of the queen’s silks, gauzes and laces. Queen Charlotte had been shocked and saddened by the onset of George III’s illness shortly before the portrait was painted. X-rays show that Lawrence modified the careworn expression which he had first observed. Yet even in the final portrait, so formal in conception, so grand in execution, something of the queen’s malaise remains touchingly evident.

The landscape background shows a view of Eton College as seen from Windsor Castle. The trees are turning red - as they might well have been in late September when the queen posed for Lawrence, but also so that the colour contrasts of carpet and dress may be echoed in the russet foliage against a blue sky. Although she cannot see the view behind her, the direction of the queen’s glance draws our own eyes to these vivid yet melancholy harbingers of winter.

The four Angerstein children were the grandchildren of a Russo-British banker, John Julius Angerstein (1765-1823), a co-founder of Lloyd’s of London and financial adviser to William Pitt.

A frayed red-velvet curtain makes it clear that the children are posing for a fancy tableau vivant. Like an infant Hercules, the littlest Angerstein, guided by his sister, wields a spade. Picturesque in tattered velvets, holding a broom, the boy to the far right recalls those poor children painted by Murillo, whose works were among the most popular pictures of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, once they had been brought to the rest of Europe during the Napoleonic wars.