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Sir Thomas Lawrence (artist) British, 1769 - 1830 Lady Mary Templetown and Her Eldest Son, 1802 oil on canvas Overall: 215 x 149 cm (84 5/8 x 58 11/16 in.) framed: 246.7 x 179.1 cm (97 1/8 x 70 1/2 in.) Andrew W. Mellon Collection 1937.1.96 On View |
Like Reynolds and Romney before him, Lawrence preferred the "higher" genre of history painting but, through talent and necessity, became a portraitist. He was enormously successful in his own lifetime, was knighted in 1815, and elected president of the Royal Academy in 1820.
Although unschooled, Lawrence had a great natural gift for fluent linear rhythms and for the dramatic uses of light and color. Composed, gentle, and serene, Lady Templetown is a woodland goddess of otherworldly proportions. The purity and simplicity of the sitters' costumes draw the pair into a sympathetic unity that is further enhanced by the surrounding darker tones of the broadly rendered landscape. Lawrence animated the paint surface with accents of vibrant red in Lady Templetown's earrings and necklace, her son's cheeks, and in the landscape.
Lawrence's idealized presentation of his sitters in an expressive, theatrical landscape epitomizes the romantic style of portraiture. But Lawrence, like Reynolds, was also a passionate student of the classical past. His ideas on beauty were adapted from Aristotle's Poetics. He participated in the project that brought the Parthenon sculptures -- the Elgin marbles -- to England and owned a vast collection of old master prints.