Portrait Artist and Painter Anna Bregman

'Thomas Lawrence: Regency Power And Brilliance' at the National Portrait Gallery

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Thomas Lawrence, born in Bristol in 1769, was in his time an artistic superstar. And yet most people visiting this exhibition of his work at the National Portrait Gallery - the first major exhibition for 30 years - will never have heard of him. However during the Regency period he was admired throughout Europe, adored by the critics who compared him to Reynolds and Gainsborough and championed by the likes of Turner and Delacroix. He painted Pope Pius VII, the Archduke of Austria, King George IV, and the Duke of Wellington. He was a brilliant draughtsman in any number of media (it's worth visiting the show just for his wonderfully subtle drawings - below), and a master of surfaces whose portraits presented his subjects with confidence and élan, and his funeral was a national event. So what went wrong with his reputation and why has he been so neglected since? (Above Right - 'Rosamond Hester Elizabeth Pennel Croker')

Above Left: 'Thomas Holcroft and William Godwin', Above Right: 'Mary Hamilton'

Lawrence was a child prodigy, the son of an innkeeper who would sell his 'likenesses' to customers for half a guinea. He became one of the youngest Royal Academicians (he would later become president of the Royal Academy), moving to London at the age of 18 and by age 20 had painted Queen Charlotte. The portrait that made his reputation was also painted at 20 - a dazzlingly accomplished and mischievous portrait of Elizabeth Farren, a famous comic actress (below)

Dressed not for the summer landscape that forms the background but in a fur and muff suggesting she has been out all night, the portrait shows off Lawrence's astonishing talent for textural detail, whether thin gauzy fabric, shiny silk with it's thick impasto highlights, or soft thick fur. It's flashy brushwork innovative and explorative on a par with Gainsborough. Perhaps part of the problem was that this delightful details are almost too good and become distracting - too easy to get caught up in.

It was Lawrence's personal life which first lessened his standing. A scandalous affair with both daughters of the actress Sarah Siddons followed by a nervous breakdown damaged his reputation. Soon after Lawrence's death this reputation rapidly declined and his sensuous and seductive portraits - often painted on a red ground which seeps out around the upper layers of paint - were branded by the Victorians as examples of Regency decadence, hedonism and loose morals. And yet whilst he suffered this evangelical backlash by the Victorians, later modernist tastes found him too slick and superficial with his concerns for surface appearances and skilful flattery. In particular his rather sickly portraits of children which were often reproduced on chocolate boxes associated him ever after with mawkishness. (Left: 'Laura Anne and Emily Calmady')

Below: 'Arthur Atherley', 'George Hamilton Gordon' and 'Robert Banks Jenkinson'

This is really a shame, because most of Lawrence's portraits are admirable not only for their technical skill. He was radical in his romantic sensibility, the directness of gaze which he gave to his subjects, the bold and sketchy reds and blacks with which he delineated the men whom he painted, gave them life and almost confrontational authority.

But it is the empathy in the portraits of some of his female subjects which is the most moving, particularly those older women whose seductive qualities he was not interested in - for instance this beautifully accomplished little pastel of the elderly Elizabeth Carter (bottom of page) or his famous, slightly melancholy portrait of Queen Charlotte (left, with detail below).

Charlotte, the wife of King George the III who had just descended into an unknown madness was apparently in a state off nervous tension at the time. The emotional sympathy with which he depicts the careworn Queen was maybe a little too honest - the portrait was rejected and Lawrence was never paid for it. But it made his reputation and rightly so.

Below: 'Elizabeth Carter', pastel on vellum

On at the National Portrait Gallery, London

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