Not on display
- Artist
- Sir Thomas Lawrence 1769–1830
- Medium
- Oil paint on canvas
- Dimensions
- Support: 2403 × 1480 mm
- Collection
- Tate
- Acquisition
- Presented by the Patrons of British Art through the Friends of the Tate Gallery 1988
- Reference
- T05466
Display caption
Lawrence was largely self-taught. He painted this portrait, his first full-length, at the age of nineteen. It put him on the map when the sitter introduced him to her friend, Queen Charlotte, who then commissioned her own portrait. Lawrence turned this into a virtuoso performance. He became the leading British portrait painter, and President of the Royal Academy. His fluent, expressive style and powerful characterisation were admired throughout Europe.The 1st Viscountess Cremorne was a granddaughter of William Penn, founder of Philadelphia. The wild background landscape must refer to Ireland, her husband’s home, if not to the American wilderness.
Gallery label, May 2007
Does this text contain inaccurate information or language that you feel we should improve or change? We would like to hear from you.
Technique and condition
The support is plain woven, linen canvas of medium weight, with a lean, oil-bound, off-white priming, probably applied by an artists' colourman.
The paint is oil, probably enriched in the dark passages with resins or perhaps bitumen. It was all built up rapidly in scumbles and glazes, with thick impasto used in the modelling of the foliage, the white areas of the costume, the tassel and the carpet (see raking-light photograph). Many areas of the paintings have developed shrinkage-cracks as a result of the original techniques: slow drying layers laid on top of faster drying layers usually develop cracks like this. The irregular browning of the face is a result of the fugitive pigment (probably a translucent red lake) fading in light, leaving us with the oil or oleo-resinous medium in which it was bound. The thick body-paint beneath it has remained unfaded.
When the painting was glue lined some time since the late nineteenth century, the heat and pressure of the iron caused some compression of the impasto. The varnish is natural resin and has yellowed very slightly.
Rica Jones
1996
Explore
- architecture(41,310)
- clothing and personal items(5,879)
-
- robe(66)
- actions: postures and motions(9,097)
-
- standing(3,131)
- woman(9,059)
- individuals: female(1,664)
- birth to death(1,462)
-
- mourning(93)
- mourning dress(10)
- peers’ robes(9)
You might like
-
Sir Thomas Lawrence Miss Laura Dorothea Ross (Mrs Francis Robertson)
c.1798–1804 -
Sir Thomas Lawrence Mrs Siddons, ? as Mrs Haller in ‘The Stranger’
c.1796–8 -
Sir Thomas Lawrence Philip Sansom
c.1805–10 -
Sir Thomas Lawrence Mrs Siddons
1804 -
Sir Thomas Lawrence John Philip Kemble as Hamlet
1801 -
Sir Thomas Lawrence Lady Georgiana Fane
?1806 -
Sir Thomas Lawrence Isabel Smith, Called Munia, Nurse to the Angerstein Family
c.1800 -
Sir Thomas Lawrence Homer Reciting his Poems
1790 -
Sir Joshua Reynolds Lady Talbot
exhibited 1782 -
Sir Thomas Lawrence Princess Lieven
?1812–20 -
Benjamin West Sir Thomas Beauchamp-Proctor, Bt
1777 -
Thomas Gainsborough The Baillie Family
c.1784 -
Robert Smirke The Afflicted Matron, the Countess Trifaldi, from ‘Don Quixote’
date not known -
Daniel Gardner Portrait of a Lady
date not known -
John Hoppner Mrs Williams
c.1790