Sir Thomas Lawrence

This alluring, late, unfinished canvas depicts the soon to be Countess Fitzwilliam. This handsome head study is typical of the immediate, rapidly rendered work that Thomas Lawrence was producing towards the end of his career, paintings which are revered today among both historians and collectors. The oil is daubed delicately and with efficacious certainty onto the sepia primed canvas. The dexterous and consummate ability which Lawrence has used to express her features, ascribes a vivacious charm. As Delacroix affirmed “nobody has ever painted eyes, women’s eyes particularly, so well as Lawrence, and those parted lips which are completely charming. He is inimitable”. These features are tenderly rendered in the example of Countess Fitzwilliam, whose dark teal eyes and ruddied lips are warm and kindly. A noble poise speaks to the sitter's societal agency.    

Seventeen years after the artist’s unexpected death in 1830 (7th January, Russell Square, London), the well-known novelist and illustrator William Makepeace Thackeray wrote of “Lawrence portraits, tawdry and beautiful, and, thirty years ago, deemed precious as works of real genius”. These words, although acknowledging his adeptness, act as a critique of what Lawrence depicted, as well as how he had depicted them. A post-Regency preoccupation with class distinction, churned forth by European revolutionary zeal, led to this assessment of establishment portraitists such as Lawrence, who were subsequently dubbed as sycophants, fawning for their elite, ignominious commissioners. He did acknowledge the gulf between himself and his patrons and referred to them accordingly as the ‘Patron and Acquaintance’ class. However, respect and admiration for his work returned during the 20th century and he is now considered one of the Regency period’s most pre-eminent painters.

Lawrence was elected to replace Benjamin West as President of the Royal Academy (1820); he was also elected first class to the Florentine Academy and to the Royal Academy of Vienna and was presented with the Légion d’honneur. This European success can be attributed to his commission by the Prince Regent (in 1821 coronated King George IV) in 1814 to paint the allied leaders of the Napoleonic Wars for the Waterloo Chamber at Windsor Castle. Furthermore, he was celebrated in France through the shared admiration of the French Romantics, such as Eugène Delacroix, who visited Lawrence’s studio in 1825. At this time, in the final decade of his career, Lawrence was at the height of his artistic prowess, stating that he believed he had never painted better. Observing this unfinished portrait of a bemused and effete Countess Fitzwilliam it may be difficult to disagree. 

The painting was originally titled ‘Lady Fitzwilliam, daughter of the Earl of Pembroke’. However, “Knoedler’s auction cataloguing was incorrect, as no daughter of an Earl of Pembroke married an Earl Fitzwilliam. There seems to be a confusion with Lady Elizabeth Herbert, eldest daughter of the 11th Earl of Pembroke, who married the 3rd Earl of Clanwilliam in 1830. If she is in fact the sitter, this was probably an engagement portrait.” This would accredit a date of approximately 1829, only a year before Lawrence’s death, making this work one of his last portraits. It could explain the fact that the painting remains unfinished. 

Interestingly, this portrait is not featured in Garlick’s monograph, as being part of the 1831 Christie’s sale of Lawrence’s estate. However, what is portrayed of the Lady Fitzwilliam is consummately polished. Lawrence effectively controls the volume of paint with each brushstroke, adeptly creating a wonderful sense of depth. This is particularly so around her hair which frames the face, the stygian locks whimsically irradiated with dashes of grey and pearly white. Furthermore, this skill was established over decades as an outstanding historical portraitist of subjects such as Lord Liverpool, George Canning, the Duke of Wellington and, crucially, Sir Robert Peel. 
Our portrait captures the best of Lawrence - and forms one of approximately 150 or so he had left incomplete at the time of his death. These wonderfully urgent unfinished depictions of sitters in fact offer us a wonderfully direct insight into both the artist’s working practice, while also anticipating the sense of immediacy and rapidly captured essence of the sitter that would become more commonplace later in the century through artists such as John Singer Sargent.