This is one of a group of similar portraits in pastels, usually oval or circular and inscribed with a warning against the damp and the sun, executed in Bath in 1783-4. He charged 3 guineas a head, 'at that time, and for Bath, a very extraordinary sum' according to Lawrence's first biographer D.E. Williams (The Life and Correspondence of Sir Thomas Lawrence, Kt., 1831, I, p. 73). This was the period when Lawrence won, in 1784, the Greater Silver Palette, for gilt, from the Society of Arts in London for his copy of Raphael: Transfiguration. (For this period of Lawrence's career see K. Garlick, Sir Thomas Lawrence: A Complete Catalogue of the Oil Paintings, Oxford 1989, p. 12, a similar portrait in pastels of the artist himself repr. fig. 1.)