Portrait of George James Welbore Agar-Ellis, later 1st Lord Dover. Sir Thomas Lawrence (British; 1769–1830). Oil on canvas, ca. 1823–24. Yale Center for British Art, New Haven, Connecticut.
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Although intended for public display, Lawrence's Elizabeth Farren, shown in 1790 under the title “Portrait of an Actress,” is perhaps more intimate than many modern family photographs. The Irish actress Farren made her London debut in 1777 and soon became a very popular comic performer. This portrait depicts her as an elegant young woman at the height of her career, before she retired from the stage to marry her aristocratic protector. Lawrence’s bold brushwork captures the sheen of satin and the plushness of fur, but his vivid, romantic painting displeased the actress, who asked the twenty-one-year-old artist to alter the depiction of her unfashionably slender figure. Elizabeth lamented that her friends thought she looked too thin and bent in the middle. Her face, nose, and neck were long, her shoulders and hips unfashionably narrow. Lawrence rather cleverly disguised certain of these traits, and the visual evidence suggests that he never took the canvas back to correct what she perceived to be its defects. Lawrence, an amateur orator and actor, brought to Elizabeth Farren's likeness the implication of motion and speech and an awareness of the role of the viewer in an imagined dialogue. The slight torsion of her upper body and her sidelong glance suggest collusion between the observer and the observed. The saturated coloring of the landscape background and the low horizon line draw attention to her quirky pose and the delicate powdery hues reserved for her face and elegant figure. She advances toward, rather than occupying, the center of the picture field, her torso sharply foreshortened, as if seen from below. Her skirt trails off the canvas in the foreground. The slight formal imbalance confers vitality, and the surface, too, is animated by the energetic and flexible combination of veils of transparent tone, highlights and details modeled in trails and globs of pigment, plus raking strokes made with the bristles of a dry brush.
Elizabeth Farren, Later Countess of Derby by Sir Thomas Lawrence (British) - Oil on canvas / 1790 - Metropolitan Museum of Art (New York) #womeninart #art #portrait #fineart #SirThomasLawrence #oilpainting #ThomasLawrence #portraitofawoman #irishactress #britishartist #themet #met #metny #lawrence
Julia Floyd (1795–1859) was married in 1820 to the British statesman Sir Robert Peel, who twice served as Prime Minister of England and was an avid patron of Lawrence. The Frick portrait apparently was inspired by Rubens’ painting of Susanna Fourment known as the Chapeau de paille, which Peel had acquired in 1823. When Lawrence’s Lady Peel was first exhibited at the Royal Academy in 1827, a critic claimed it to be among “the highest achievements of modern art.” Lawrence’s flamboyant and virtuoso style has come to epitomize the spirit of the Regency period. Julia looks directly at the artist wearing a black wide brim hat with large brilliant vermillion feathers and a heavy elaborate crimson coat with white fur trim covering her elegant cream colored gown with large red flower pinned to the chest. Her left arm is folded against her stomach giving viewers a clear display of a large fancy gold bracelets and a giant ring on her wedding finger.
Portrait of Julia, Lady Peel (Julia Ford) by Sir Thomas Lawrence (English) - Oil on canvas / 1827 - The Frick Collection (New York, NY) #womeninart #portrait #thefrick #art #sirthomaslawrence #artwork #englishart #frickcollection #painting #thomaslawrence #artoftheday #fineart #bskyart #bsky.art
Catherine Woronzow, Countess of Pembrokeshire by #SirThomasLawrence. Posting as she seems to have the happy but exhausted look of a new mum
Charcoal sketch of a sitting woman. She eats a long, white dress with puffy sleeves, her hair arranged in a bun, and her hands folded in front of her.
Day 22. “Margaret, Countess of Blessington” charcoal on paper. After Sir Thomas Lawrence.
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