This book is the first sustained study of the work of Lawrence to be published for many years, and the first ever to pay proper attention to his highly accomplished drawings as well as to his paintings. Tracing the steps in his career, Michael Levey analyses and illustrates the finest of Lawrence’s achievements, making pertinent comparisons with the work of his British contemporaries and also with that of major foreign artists like Goya and Ingres. Admired from early childhood onwards for his instinctive ability to seize a likeness, Lawrence vividly recreated most of the leading personalities of his day, not only in England but in post-Napoleonic Europe, culminating in his masterly fulllength portrait of Pope Pius VII. Yet some of his most attractive studies - painted or drawn - are of unimportant people, of friends and of children. Several striking works reproduced here have remained in private hands and will be largely unfamiliar.

Sir Thomas Lawrence (1769--1830) was the most gifted and successful British portrait painter in the generation following Gainsborough and Reynolds, and his pre-eminence was publicly confirmed when he was elected President of the Royal Academy of Arts in 1820. Although he rose to fame when George III still actively ruled, he will always be associated with the Regency and the extensive, enlightened patronage he received form the Prince Regent, later George IV. Yet partly because of that association with a period and a monarch generally derided, and partly because of its bravura style, Lawrence’s work has often been dismissed as flashy and meretricious. This beautifully illustrated, eloquently written and comprehensive account reverses that view, demonstrating that Lawrence was an intelligent, hard-working and profoundly conscientious artist.

Preface and Acknowledgements  

Introduction: The Artist, his Art and the Age  

Birth, Background, Beginnings  

‘... much employment at Bath’  

Painter Extraordinary and Painter-in-Ordinary  

Fluctuating Fortunes  

‘Slave of the picture’  

‘The first in my profession’  

The Mission Abroad  

A New King and a New President  

‘I have never painted better’  

Epilogue: ‘Always something to worrit him’  

Notes  

Select Bibliography  

Photograph Credits  

Index