Funeral of Sir Thomas Lawrence: A Sketch from Memory

One of Turner’s most prominent contemporary advocates was the artist, Sir Thomas Lawrence (1769–1830). The leading portraitist of the age, Lawrence was famed throughout Europe for his portraits of royalty, statesmen, military leaders and fashionable society, and his achievements brought him many honours including Principal Painter-in-Ordinary to the King, and also from 1820, President of the Royal Academy. Famously describing Turner as ‘indisputably the first landscape painter in Europe’,1 he not only owned some of the younger man’s paintings,2 but also supported his friend in other practical ways, such as helping to secure his only royal commission,3 and, in 1819, encouraging Turner to join him in Italy, writing to Joseph Farington: ‘Turner should come to Rome. His Genius would here be supplied with new Materials, and entirely congenial with it ... It is a fact, that the Country and scenes around me, do thus impress themselves upon me, and that Turner is always associated with them.’4 Following Turner’s arrival in Rome, Lawrence assisted him by introducing him to artistic society and facilitating his access to the Vatican and other artistic institutions.5 Turner was therefore greatly shocked by Lawrence’s sudden demise aged sixty-one on 7 January 1830, writing sorrowfully to fellow Academician Charles Lock Eastlake, ‘Do but think what a loss we and the arts have in the death of Sir Tho[ma]s Lawrence’.6 The news followed hard on the heels of other recent bereavements: that of Turner’s father in September 1829; another Academician, George Dawe in October; and finally, his close acquaintance, Harriet Wells, on 1 January 1830. In the wake of Lawrence’s funeral on 21 January, Turner poured his feelings of sadness and respect into this painted rendition of the event which he subtitled in an inscription ‘A sketch from memory’.

Lawrence’s funeral was a public occasion of great pomp and pageantry, unrivalled by any since that of Lord Nelson twenty-five years earlier. At the request of the Royal Academy the body was taken the night before the ceremony to Somerset House where it lay in repose in the model room, transformed by candles and black cloth hangings.7 The following day, at about 12.30pm, the velvet-draped coffin was transferred to a hearse and taken in solemn procession to St Paul’s Cathedral. Vast numbers of people gathered to witness the spectacle and members of the recently established Metropolitan Police Force were drafted in to control the crowds and traffic along the Strand.8 The event was reported in exhaustive detail by the Times newspaper who recorded that the order of the carefully stage-managed funerary procession was comprised of the following dignitaries and attendants: