Sir Henry Seymour Rawlinson, second Baronet and Baron Rawlinson of Trent (1864-1925) began his career as a captain in the Grenadier Guards and served in Burma, Cairo and South Africa, and was promoted to Major-General in 1909. He was posted to France with the British Army in 1914 and took part in the battle of Ypres and the Somme. He was promoted to General in January 1917, and it was while Lavery was in France that he first met and painted the sitter. General Rawlinson's successes in the battle of the Somme led to his creation as British Military representative on the Supreme War Council, and later Baron. In 1920 he became Commander-in-Chief in India where he lived until his death from the after-effects of an operation. Other portraits by Oswald Birley and Sir William Orpen are in the collection of the Imperial War Museum, London, and he appears in John Singer Sargent's 'Some General Officers of the Great War', 1922, in the collection of the National Portrait Gallery, London
(see J.R.H. Weaver (Ed.), Dictionary of National Biography 1922-1930, Oxford, 1987, pp.709-12)