Part 1

MASTERPIECES IN COLOUR EDITED BY - - T. LEMAN HARE

LAWRENCE

1769--1830

“MASTERPIECES IN COLOUR” SERIES

ARTIST. AUTHOR. BELLINI. GEORGE HAY. BOTTICELLI. HENRY B. BINNS. BOUCHER. C. HALDANE MACFALL. BURNE-JONES. A. LYS BALDRY. CARLO DOLCI. GEORGE HAY. CHARDIN. PAUL G. KONODY. CONSTABLE. C. LEWIS HIND. COROT. SIDNEY ALLNUTT. DA VINCI. M. W. BROCKWELL. DELACROIX. PAUL G. KONODY. DÜRER. H. E. A. FURST. FRA ANGELICO. JAMES MASON. FRA FILIPPO LIPPI. PAUL G. KONODY. FRAGONARD. C. HALDANE MACFALL. FRANZ HALS. EDGCUMBE STALEY. GAINSBOROUGH. MAX ROTHSCHILD. GREUZE. ALYS EYRE MACKLIN. HOGARTH. C. LEWIS HIND. HOLBEIN. S. L. BENSUSAN. HOLMAN HUNT. MARY E. COLERIDGE. INGRES. A. J. FINBERG. LAWRENCE. S. L. BENSUSAN. LE BRUN, VIGEE. C. HALDANE MACFALL. LEIGHTON. A. LYS BALDRY. LUINI. JAMES MASON. MANTEGNA. MRS. ARTHUR BELL. MEMLINC. W. H. J. & J. C. WEALE. MILLAIS. A. LYS BALDRY. MILLET. PERCY M. TURNER. MURILLO. S. L. BENSUSAN. PERUGINO. SELWYN BRINTON. RAEBURN. JAMES I. CAW. RAPHAEL. PAUL G. KONODY. REMBRANDT. JOSEF ISRAELS. REYNOLDS. S. L. BENSUSAN. ROMNEY. C. LEWIS HIND. ROSSETTI. LUCIEN PISSARRO. RUBENS. S. L. BENSUSAN. SARGENT. T. MARTIN WOOD. TINTORETTO. S. L. BENSUSAN. TITIAN. S. L. BENSUSAN. TURNER. C. LEWIS HIND. VAN DYCK. PERCY M. TURNER. VELAZQUEZ. S. L. BENSUSAN. WATTEAU. C. LEWIS HIND. WATTS. W. LOFTUS HARK. WHISTLER. T. MARTIN WOOD. _Others in Preparation._

LAWRENCE

BY S. L. BENSUSAN

ILLUSTRATED WITH EIGHT REPRODUCTIONS IN COLOUR

LONDON: T. C. & E. C. JACK NEW YORK: FREDERICK A. STOKES CO.

LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS

Plate

I. Master Lambton Frontispiece In the collection of the Earl of Durham

Page II. Mrs. Siddons 14 In the National Gallery

III. Portrait of Mr. and Mrs. John Julius Angerstein 24 In the Louvre

IV. Miss Georgina Lennox, afterwards Countess Bathurst 34 In the collection of Earl Bathurst

V. Miss Maria Siddons 40 In the Wallace Collection

VI. Portrait of a Lady 50 In the Wallace Collection

VII. Portrait of Countess Blessington 60 In the Wallace Collection

VIII. King George IV. 70 In the Wallace Collection

I

The prodigy is no unfamiliar figure in our midst to-day--indeed the world’s wonder children tend ever to increase in numbers and attainments. For the most part they belong to the realm of music; poets and artists must be made as well as born. We are but mildly excited when the papers announce the arrival in town of a child who can play the piano like Rubinstein or the violin like Paganini; we know that though the statement be a gross and misleading exaggeration, we shall at least hear work that is little short of marvellous from hands that might well have known no heavier burden than toys. We know, too, that these precocious children tend to make their début and disappear, making way for others. If they are to develop their promise, a long spell of study is inevitable, and for the most part parents and guardians are more intent upon present profit than future prestige.

The precocious lad whose talent makes him a painter is rare. Natural aptitude for drawing and natural sense of colour are not uncommon, but the possessor of these gifts may remain quite undistinguished. He generally succeeds in doing so in these days when the old traditions of art are despised by the _cognoscenti_, and the genuine faculty of interpretation is not understood or appreciated by the rank and file of those who pay their annual tribute of one shilling to the authorities of Burlington House, and are not always ashamed to frame the colour plates that illustrated papers inflict upon their long-suffering subscribers. Life is harder for the young painter of genius than his contemporary musician of like age. It was not always so, and turning back to the history of England’s accepted artists, the name of Sir Thomas Lawrence, P.R.A., stands out as one of the most brilliant examples in the history of art, of untutored skill that came near to amounting to positive genius.

The history of the Italian painters provides us with many cases in which men, starting life with talents akin to those that Lawrence enjoyed, claimed and found a measure of immortality. Only a few will be found to declare that the English painter is destined to the very highest place in the annals of British art, but at his best he is a very notable painter indeed, in spite of the fact that everything in his life was working in opposition to the best interests of his art. He had no education, his gifts were exploited shamelessly from the days when he was a little boy. As he grew up, the imperious need for money gave to purely commercial work the precious years that should have been surrendered to study. Happily Fortune was not altogether unkind. She checked the proper development of rare talent, she kept the painter from all opportunity of becoming the most outstanding figure of his generation in the critical eyes of generations to come; but, on the other hand, she loaded him with all the material favours within her gift. His career was as brilliant as the passage of a meteor through the sky; he rose from surroundings of the most unsatisfactory kind to the highest place in the profession he adorned. He became the intimate of princes and people of high degree, and, with certain limitations imposed by an incomplete education, he was a great painter.

From many of his canvases we can see man’s splendid gifts struggling for full expression. At times he seems to be a reflection of a still greater man, Sir Joshua Reynolds; at other times he is the founder of a tradition that lesser men were to make vulgar and commonplace and bring ultimately into disrepute. But at every period of his life and in every aspect of his work with which we are acquainted, Thomas Lawrence is interesting--perhaps it is permissible to say he is even lovable. One gets the impression of a strong man who has equipped himself for life’s race in despite of disadvantages that would have crushed and quelled the spirit of a weakling, a man who makes for the most difficult goal, and reaches it in triumph. He is an Englishman every inch of him, and the spirit that supported him is one he shared with the greatest of this island’s citizens. Even the most severe of his critics cannot hide their admiration of the man, though they are most acutely conscious of the shortcomings of the artist.

It is fair to remember, too, that much of the painter’s work was done under certain disadvantages inherent in the times of his activity. With the close of the eighteenth and the beginning of the nineteenth century, costume was stiff and ugly to an extreme that excites our laughter now. The age of artificiality was upon land, and Sir Thomas Lawrence was not so well equipped for making the best of it as were Reynolds and Gainsborough, who came immediately before him. That he succeeded so often in making the personality of a sitter overcome the absurdities of dress and decoration is an eloquent tribute to his art. His treatment of children is frankly delightful but frankly derivative; it is only necessary to refer to such portraits as the “Childhood’s Innocence,” “Master Lambton,” “Nature,” and the “Countess Gower and Daughter,” to see how great is his debt to one who was _facile princeps_ among the painters of childhood--Sir Joshua himself--and how far he fell short of his teacher’s greatness. But the gallery of children is a small one; the collection of representative men and women of his time is far larger, more representative, and painting many of these portraits the artist is speaking with his own voice, the voice that lured so many men of a later generation to assume it as their own, with results that are little short of lamentable. Students of the life of Sir Thomas Lawrence must surely have shared the writer’s regret that the strong soul, the sure hand, and the far-seeing eye were not destined to have lived and thrived in the golden age of the Italian Renaissance. Then such natural gifts were stimulated to the highest possible pitch of development by the splendour of a more flamboyant life, the glory of a less restricted power, the rare beauty of pageant and of costume unknown to late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century England, in a land where beauty was the very keynote of existence. There, poverty was a stimulus to countless artists whose very names thrill us as we mention them, men whose genius is enshrined in the galleries of Venice, Florence, and Rome. Under Italian skies such gifts as Lawrence possessed would have blossomed and budded and filled the face of the world with fruit. Eighteenth- and nineteenth-century skies in England were never bright enough to teach Lawrence the one secret that his canvases lack--the secret of exquisite colour that came to Sir Joshua in his prime, though, alas, it faded from so many canvases as surely as it passed from the laughing faces that thronged his studio.

Taste, Lawrence had in a very marked measure; his draughtsmanship was facile and sure to an almost dangerous degree; but in point of colour, as in some of the more subtle qualities of portrait-painting, he lacked the equality of gifts that would have silenced our later-day criticism. Only when we turn to consider the conditions under which his early life was passed, and the labours that were enforced upon him at a tender age, do we cease to complain of his slight limitations in wonder of the great gifts that passed unscathed through his troubled childhood, his scanty days of training, his long years of devoted toil, his season of honours and great rewards. The record of Lawrence’s life is full of interest that has been heightened in the past few years by the publication in 1904 of “An Artist’s Love Story,” edited by Mr. Oswald G. Knapp. With the issue of this work, made up of hitherto unpublished letters written by the painter, Mrs. Siddons and her daughters, Martha and Maria, a fresh and interesting light was thrown upon the artist’s relations with the great actress and upon his devotion to her daughters; the countless stories and rumours that passed current in his day have been corrected. Through this correspondence we see more of the man than any biography had ever succeeded in showing us, and as the painter had been dead for more than seventy years when the book was published, and had left no descendants, there could be no suggestion of impropriety in the publication. Many of the letters are more than a century old.

In the light of the leading biographies, the brief one by Redgrave, the longer and more interesting biography by Allan Cunningham, and some others of less note, and with the aid of this volume of correspondence, it is possible to set down at all necessary length the story of the artist’s life, and to speak with some authority of the conditions under which the bulk of his work was done.

II

THE PAINTER’S LIFE

Thomas Lawrence was born in the year 1769, when Sir Joshua Reynolds was in his forty-sixth year, and Gainsborough was two-and-forty years his senior. His father, after whom he was named, was a ne’er-do-well of decent birth and good education who had made a clandestine marriage with a lady of better social position than his own; for Lucy Read, who married Thomas Lawrence, senior, was related to the Powis family. Because she listened to his suit she was disowned and disinherited by her relations. Her influence upon her son would seem to have been wholly good; indeed he was devoted to both parents, though his father started to exploit the child’s gifts in nursery days; and his grief when the old people died was very severe. Thomas Lawrence, senior, “stiff in opinion, always in the wrong,” was “everything in turn and nothing long.” Attorney, verse-writer, actor, exciseman, and farmer, he had become a tavern-keeper when his sorely tried wife presented him with the baby who was destined to paint the portrait of Benjamin West that hangs in the National Portrait Gallery, and to succeed him as President of the Royal Academy.

At a very early age little Thomas Lawrence developed a wonderful gift for making life-like sketches, and at the same time he inherited his father’s gift of recitation. Such an effective combination seemed to be too good to waste, and the elder Lawrence employed the lad to improve custom in the Bristol tavern over which he presided in his own careless fashion. Visitors were invited to hear the infant prodigy recite, or if their ears were duller than their eyes, they were invited to sit for their portraits. Doubtless this was excellent for custom, but it did not avail altogether, for the Bristol house on the great Bath Road soon passed into the hands of unsatisfied creditors, and the family moved, not without considerable private aid, to the Black Bear Inn at Devizes, then a place of importance to the coaches passing on their way to and from the west. At Devizes the boy received a little education, nothing better than a smattering, and was called upon at short intervals to exhibit his precocity. He soon found an influential and appreciative audience.

A large proportion of those who patronised the Black Bear Inn were men of position and culture; they could not only appreciate the boy’s gifts, but could reward them. Indeed we read that a few years later the elder Lawrence received an offer from one of his old-time visitors, Sir Henry Harpur, to send the boy to Italy and have his gifts developed in the best schools. Unhappily the father knew as much about art as he did about inn-keeping; he was indignant rather than pleased with the suggestion that foreign study could improve the child’s gifts. “My son’s talents,” he replied, “require no cultivation,” and this answer says more for his stupidity than all his repeated failures to adapt himself to any one of the many occupations he followed so unsuccessfully until the time came when he could live in comparative affluence upon the proceeds of his boy’s talent. Doubtless in the latter days he ever prided himself upon the discernment that had kept the lad by his side.

The artist’s earliest work would seem to have consisted of chalk drawings which were produced with great rapidity and sold to his father’s customers for half a guinea or a guinea each. The likeness in each case must have been good, for it is on record that one of his earliest efforts, a sketch of Lady Kenyon, who stayed at his father’s inn with her husband, was easily recognised five-and-twenty years later. But drawing was not the only accomplishment of his early days. He was, as has been remarked earlier, a clever reciter. Garrick heard him twice when he was a lad, and on the second occasion asked his father if “Tommy was to be an actor or a painter?” The father had no doubt at all about the profession that promised to be the more profitable, and, in later years, when the artist was very anxious to go upon the stage, was at great pains to persuade him not to do so. As his son was more intent upon helping the family than anything else, the advice was taken, and doubtless the results justified it. The theatre could have offered no equal reward for talent, however great. To the end of his days the painter was a fluent reciter, and possessed a mastery over his voice that could turn every tone into a caress. More than one woman was misled by it into thinking that the artist was seriously in love with her.

As early as 1785 young Lawrence received his first public recognition; it came from the Society of Arts, which was then quite a serious rival of the Royal Academy. He sent a copy on glass of a Transfiguration, perhaps one he had seen at Corsham House, the seat of the Methuen family. It was made two years before, when the painter was fourteen years of age, and although the rules of the Society did not admit of a work being put in for competition more than a year after it was painted, the Council felt bound to make an exception in this case, and presented him with five guineas and a silver-gilt palette. For a boy, and he was nothing more, this was a considerable triumph, but it had been led up to by much startling work at Devizes and Oxford. When young Lawrence was ten years old, Daines Barrington (Gilbert White’s correspondent) had referred to him as “a lad who can copy historical pictures amazingly, and is likewise an excellent reader of blank verse.”

From Devizes the family had gone to Oxford, where they lived and thrived upon the proceeds of the boy’s pencil. Among his sitters were the Bishops of Oxford and Llandaff, Earls Bathurst and Warwick, Countess Egremont, and many others. The visitors to the inn at Bristol and Devizes had spread his fame, and Oxford was such a liberal patron that Thomas Lawrence, senior, moved to Bath, where he took a house at one hundred pounds a year rental as a boarding-house. Sitters were expected, and did not fail. Here it was that young Lawrence painted Mrs. Siddons for the first time, that Sir Henry Harpur offered to adopt him, and that Hoare the painter, to whom the boy was indebted for many hints, wanted him to sit for a picture of the youthful Christ. Small wonder that if at the age of seventeen, after he had taken up oils instead of crayon, and had copied a certain number of old masters--Rembrandt, Reynolds, Titian--his thoughts turned to London, the Mecca of all British art pilgrims; and he wrote to his mother with the unblushing confidence of youth to say, he “would risk his reputation for the painting of a head”--the reputation of seventeen years--“with any save Sir Joshua.” Gainsborough, Romney, and Hoppner were very much in evidence then, and the challenge would seem an odd one if it had been more than a lad’s confidential boast to his mother.

So he came to London, entered himself as an Academy student, and took apartments in Leicester Fields, a district made popular by Sir Joshua. His father was behind him in all this; and as there was some money in hand, and a good send-off was necessary, an exhibition of the boy’s work was arranged. To make it still more attractive, the worthy innkeeper included a collection of stuffed birds recently acquired. Between the amateurs of art and ornithology the exhibition fell to the ground; it was a failure unredeemed. Happily the funds were still sufficient to enable young Lawrence to take a house in Duke Street, St. James’, and a studio in Jermyn Street near by. Hoare introduced him to Sir Joshua, for whom Lawrence’s admiration was ever whole-hearted. The great painter looked at his work, and remarked, “Study nature--study nature.” In years to come, looking at some of the famous early portraits, he remarked with the rare generosity that was one of his characteristics, “This young man has begun at a point of excellence where I left off.”

Success did not come with Lawrence from the provinces; a few years were to pass before it visited him in London and elected to remain associated with his work as long as he lived. He found many friends, and was much at the house of Mrs. Siddons, whose portrait as Zara he had painted four years earlier. Her family consisted then of two boys, Henry and George, and two daughters, Sarah Martha (Sally), then twelve years old, and Maria, aged eight. It was round the lives of these two girls that the strangest romance of Lawrence’s life was to be woven. Both Sally and Maria were very attractive girls, with the fragile beauty that suggests early in life a tendency to consumption. John Kemble, another firm friend of Lawrence, was brother of Mrs. Siddons.