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Lot Essay
This is one of Thomas Lawrence’s most celebrated portraits of the Duke of Wellington, Britain’s greatest military hero, following his defeat of Napoleon at the Battle of Waterloo in 1815. Begun in 1820, the year the artist was elected President of the Royal Academy, and exhibited there to great acclaim in 1822, it was considered by Wellington to be Lawrence's finest painting. Moreover, it is in this likeness that Lawrence comes as close as any to penetrating Wellington’s aura of heroism and capturing the essence of the man. Tellingly, it was Samuel Cousins’s mezzotint of this image, rather than one of Lawrence’s seven other portraits of the sitter, that Wellington most often gave to his friends and admirers. Rarely seen in public, the picture was one of the stars of the 2010-11 exhibition: Thomas Lawrence, Regency Power and Brilliance (loc. cit.), when the critic Laura Cumming singled out ‘his marvelous portrait of Wellington, cool, clear and close up, the live eyes - full of shrewd integrity - bringing his friend directly into our present’. The canvas, which remains in a beautifully preserved state, is an outstanding example of Lawrence’s work that secured his reputation as the finest portraitist in Europe and has enthralled subsequent generations of artists and collectors.
The Duke of Wellington had first sat to Lawrence in the summer of 1814, in the wake of his victorious Peninsular Campaign against Napoleon's armies in Portugal and Spain. The challenge for Lawrence (fig. 1), Wellington's exact contemporary, was how to represent the greatest military hero of the day, a man feted as Europe's military saviour. In total Lawrence was to execute eight portraits of Wellington over a period of fifteen years and it is perhaps these portraits more than those of any other artist that have defined Wellington in visual terms for posterity.
Lawrence's first portraits of Wellington, respectively commissioned by Lord Charles Stewart, later 3rd Marquess of Londonderry (1778-1854), Wellington's one-time Adjutant-General who had served with him during the Peninsular Campaign, and the Prince Regent, are both ambitious and heroic full-lengths, in which the influence of Joshua Reynolds's portraits of famous military figures can be clearly discerned. The latter, conceived on a large scale (124 ½ x 96 in.) and exhibited at the Royal Academy in 1815, shows the Duke holding aloft the Sword of State which he carried at the thanksgiving service held at St Paul's Cathedral following Napoleon's final defeat at Waterloo on the 7th July 1815 (Royal Collection). In it Wellington proudly stands, adorned with the multiple honours bestowed upon him by the grateful rulers of Europe. Lawrence's translation of Wellington's heroism was to culminate in another majestic full-length portrait conceived on a grand scale (156 x 96 in.) which was commissioned by Henry, 3rd Earl Bathurst (1762-1834), Secretary of State for War and the Colonies (1812-27), and begun in 1817. In the Bathurst portrait, Wellington is shown mounted on his celebrated charger Copenhagen on the field of Waterloo in the uniform he wore at the battle (private collection).
When, however, the Duke came to commission a portrait for his friend and future sister-in-law Marianne Patterson (see following lot), he was content with a less obviously heroic representation, reflecting perhaps what Andrew Roberts has described as his being 'very vain about his lack of vanity' (A. Roberts, Napoleon and Wellington, London, 2001, p. 110). The resulting portrait (London, Apsley House; fig. 2) has more in common with the understatement which characterises the portrait which Francisco de Goya had executed of him in Madrid after the Battle of Salamanca in 1812 (London, National Gallery). On a more human and less grandiose format (36 x 28 in.) compared to the portraits Lawrence had executed previously, it shows Wellington in military uniform and with the Star and Ribbon of the Order of the Garter, and the Golden Fleece ribbon. The Apsley House picture is perhaps the greatest of all of Lawrence's portraits of Wellington steering, as Michael Levey comments, 'adroitly between extremes of grandeur and ordinariness, managing to convey - without any hint of swaggering - an air of supreme self-confidence' (op. cit., p. 26).
Painted in 1820, the present portrait is traditionally believed to have been commissioned by Wellington's close friends, Charles and Harriet Arbuthnot, whom he met in Paris in 1814, although it may have been commissioned by the Duke himself and gifted to them. Charles Arbuthnot (1767-1850), a diplomat and politician, had served in important roles in Sweden and Portugal, and for a short while as Under Secretary for Foreign Affairs, before the diplomatic assignment for which he is chiefly remembered, as Ambassador Extraordinary to Constantinople. There he was involved in diplomatic duelling with Napoleon's envoy General Sebastiani which resulted ultimately in the British fleet forcing the Dardanelles. He subsequently returned to England to become Joint Secretary of the Treasury, but his influence extended beyond his formal government role on account of his popularity across the political spectrum. Grenville commented in his memoirs that he was 'more largely mixed up with the principal people and events of his time than any other man'. One of Wellington's closest friends, he married as his second wife Harriet Fane, daughter of the Hon. Henry Fane, of Fulbeck Hall, Lincolnshire, second son of the 8th Earl of Westmoreland, who was herself to become one of Wellington's closest confidantes. Indeed, between 1820 and 1834 she received no fewer than 1,488 letters from Wellington (see C. Wellesley, op. cit., p. 60). After her premature death in 1835, Charles Arbuthnot was to live the remaining fifteen years of his life in the company of Wellington at the Duke's London home, Apsley House.
Twenty-six years her husband's junior, Harriet Arbuthnot (fig. 3) thrived on the political world that her marriage opened up to her and politics became the passion of her life. A staunch Tory, her vivacity is clearly conveyed in the portrait of her which Lawrence exhibited at the Royal Academy in 1817 (present whereabouts unknown; see Garlick, op. cit., 1989, no. 42), the same year in which Wellington commissioned a portrait of Marianne Patterson (see following lot). Both Marianne’s portrait and one of Harriet were hung alongside the Apsley House half-length of Wellington for the 2022 exhibition: Wellington, Women and Friendship. Harriet’s diaries, eventually published long after her death, in 1950, shed light on many of the principal figures of the day including Canning, Castlereagh, Wellington, Liverpool and Peel. The intimate portrait that she gives of Wellington in which she shows herself to be affectionate and admiring of him but not blind to his imperfections, did much to balance other accounts which had often cast him as cold and unapproachable. In her diaries he appears, although plain spoken, as good-natured and popular with his friends and even shows himself open to her political opinions.
The present work stands out among Lawrence's portraits of Wellington for the plainness of its conception and its intimacy, which seems to reflect the close relationship between Wellington and the Arbuthnots, and mirrors to an extent the private side of the hero which Harriet reveals in her diaries. Unlike the more obviously heroic portraits that had preceded it, the Duke is shown in civilian clothes rather than military uniform, and a military cloak, with only the inclusion of the Insignia of the Golden Fleece (a unique honour for somebody neither royal nor Roman Catholic) alluding directly to the scale of his military achievements. A drawing in black and white chalk, now in the National Portrait Gallery, London (c.1820), shows Wellington in the same pose and was presumably executed by Lawrence prior to taking up the brush for the present portrait.
In her diary Harriet Arbuthnot recorded that 'The Duke of Wellington is going to sit to Lawrence for us' in an entry on the 22 June 1820 and later that year mentioned that 'the Duke had been sitting for our picture to Lawrence ...' (8 October 1820; op. cit., pp. 25 and 41). The portrait was finished by the end of the year and Harriet Arbuthnot, who had not seen it before, recorded her reaction to it in her diary. Not only was she 'delighted with it' but she considered it 'more like him than any picture I ever saw of him and quite different...' remarking that while 'All other pictures of him depict him as a hero this portrait has all the softness and sweetness of countenance which characterises him when he is in the private society of his friends' and noting also that 'the cloak is just like the Duke wears it, and the hand remarkably like!' (op. cit. pp. 58-9).
The Duke shared her enthusiasm for the portrait, writing to her in November 1820 that it 'is as good as any Lawrence ever painted' and later to the Duchess of Northumberland in a letter of 13 May 1837 that 'Mr. Arbuthnot's picture is one of the best if not the best that he ever painted'. His favourable reaction to it was reflected in the fact that, in the form of the mezzotint by Cousins, it was the portrait of himself that he chose most often when giving likenesses of himself to favoured friends, thereby becoming one of the best known images of him.
In 1822, during his third year as President, Lawrence exhibited a procession of outstanding works at the Academy's annual exhibition. His portrait of Wellington was widely praised, with one reviewer writing:
We have never witnessed before so fine a likeness of England's matchless hero; the eye is so uncommonly well delineated, so expressive, so truly characteristic of the valorous spirit that actuates the original, that it is not long before the spectator can cease regarding this exquisite picture, and when once regarded with attention, we will venture to say it can never be forgotten,
''While memory holds her seat.''
[La Belle Assemblée, August 1822]
That year Lawrence also showed his coronation full-length of King George IV - in the robes designed by the regent himself (1821; Royal Collection), the gloriously romantic half-length of the Russian general, Mikhail Vorontsov (1821; Saint Petersburg, Hermitage Museum), and his portrait of the novelist and literary hostess Marguerite Gardiner, Countess of Blessington (1822; London, Wallace Collection; fig. 4). The last of these must surely be counted among the finest female portraits of Lawrence's entire career. Ironically, the undisputed star attraction of the Academy's exhibition that year was a picture commissioned by the Duke of Wellington; such was the popularity of David Wilkie's Chelsea Pensioners reading the Waterloo Dispatch (1816; London, Apsley House) that a rail had to be installed to protect the painting from the thronging crowds.
Lawrence’s portrait of Wellington remained in the possession of the Arbuthnot family until it was sold at Christie's in 1878, when it was acquired by Archibald Primrose, 5th Earl of Rosebery (1847-1929). Rosebery, who had married Hannah de Rothschild, daughter of Baron Mayer de Rothschild, and reputedly the richest heiress in England, in March that year, was to form a celebrated collection of historical portraits, while pursuing a political career that culminated in him becoming Prime Minister in 1894. The portrait was later sold by Archibald, 6th Earl of Rosebery, at Christie's in May 1939, as one of the highlights of an important collection of pictures, when it was acquired by W.U. Goodbody, in the possession of whose family it remained until the sale at Christie’s in 2006.
THE FRAME
Throughout his career Lawrence remained famously fastidious over the framing of his work. In a letter sent to one of his sitters in 1828, he wrote, ‘A good frame… should be sufficiently broad and rich, but the ornament of that richness composed throughout of small parts, and usually it should be unburnished.’ The frame for his portrait of Wellington was made by Michael Tijou (active 1795, d1835/6), whose family belonged to the group of carvers and gilders of Huguenot descent - including the Pelletiers, the Gossets, and Paul Petit – that had escaped France and taken refuge in London following the Revocation of the Edict of Nantes in 1685. Tijou is documented as having supplied frames for Lawrence from circa 1816 to 1822. However, from 1802, he held premises at Greek Street where Lawrence himself lived from 1797 until 1813, thus making an earlier association highly probable.
The profile and decoration of the present frame compare very closely with those of the frame for the Countess of Blessington portrait (see fig. 4), also exhibited at the Academy in 1822, and with that supplied for Lawrence's magnificent unfinished head study in profile of George IV (c.1814; London, National Portrait Gallery). Both the Wellington and Blessington frames were conceivably among the last that Tijou supplied Lawrence as the following year the artist began his association with the frame maker George Morant. Lawrence died owing Tijou £68. 10s. 6d., the sum of which was paid by his estate in 1830. Interestingly, Tijou bought several works at the artist's posthumous studio sales, including the first lot from the acclaimed group of eighteen works in chalk on prepared canvas sold at Christie’s on 17-19 June 1830 (see following lot).
LAWRENCE'S LEGACY
At the Paris Salon of 1824, Lawrence received the Légion d'honneur and was feted as one of the leading revolutionaries to overturn all the established restrictions of classicism that had long dominated painting in France. By 1827 the young Stendhal announced, 'The English manner enjoys a triumph in Paris... Mr Lawrence's name is immortal'. This period was unquestionably a high-water mark for the painter’s career, but the trajectory of this child prodigy son of a Bristol innkeeper would prove to be as remarkable as the subsequent reputational descent following his sudden death in January 1830. His portraits were quickly and inextricably linked with George IV's reign, which ended with the king's death in June of the same year and became, as Michael Levey put it, 'a by-word for vanity, dissipation and excess' (op. cit., 2005, p. 1).
Today, it is apposite that Lawrence's immediate artistic legacy is best appreciated not at Tate Britain, the nation's museum dedicated to British art, but at the National Gallery. On entering the Central Hall, the visitor encounters three full-length portraits along the East wall; Lawrence's iconic 'Red Boy' of Charles William Lambton (1825; fig. 5), Eugene Delacroix's portrait of Louis-Auguste Schwiter (1826-1830; fig. 6) and John Singer Sargent's Lord Ribblesdale (1902; fig. 7). In this pantheon of Western painting, where Lawrence's status as the most talented portraitist of his age is left in no doubt, his influence on contemporary and later artistic luminaries is equally eloquent.
Delacroix was not the only contemporary French painter to admire Lawrence's virtuosic handling of paint. Théodore Géricault (1791-1824), one of the pioneers of Romanticism in France, visited London in 1820-21, where he attended the annual Royal Academy dinner at Lawrence's invitation. While Géricault's sublime series of ten paintings of the insane (fig. 8), executed soon after his return to France in 1821, are on an altogether different psychological plane to the images of Regency England, the fluent brushwork surely betrays the impact of his recent encounter with Lawrence's portraiture.
Delacroix's canvas of the young artist Louis-Auguste Schwiter constitutes an altogether more overt homage to Lawrence. The leader of the French Romantic school, Delacroix had visited the British artist in London in the spring of 1825, the period in which Lawrence had written to his sister, declaring that he had 'never painted better'. Schwiter, a portraitist and staunch Anglophile who is known to have made a copy of Lawrence's likeness of Benjamin West, is shown as the archetypal contemporary dandy, dressed simply in black. The National Gallery picture, which marked Delacroix's first foray into full-length portraiture and the first to be set in an outdoor landscape, was later acquired by Edgar Degas for the Impressionist painter's own collection. Delacroix ranked Lawrence more highly than Sir Anthony van Dyck, observing that the British artist's sitters 'really live; they can walk, move'. In what proved to be a neat historical vignette, following the opening of the Salon in 1827 Delacroix wrote to Schwiter, encouraging his friend to return to Paris so that he could see Lawrence's portrait of Lambton, a work he had greatly admired but until then only known through the engraving.
If Lawrence had provided the defining images of the Regency period, John Singer Sargent did the same for Edwardian England and contemporary American society. Sargent’s fluent style was greatly informed by his study of the old masters from Tintoretto to Velázquez and Lawrence, all painters known for the rapidity of their brush. The American’s 1904 portrait of Lord Londonderry and his page (Boston, Museum of Fine Arts) was painted in direct response to Lawrence’s 1815 full-length of Wellington, executed for the Waterloo Chamber at Windsor Castle. Further evidence of Sargent’s admiration for Lawrence can be seen in his portrait of Mathilde Townsend (1907; Washington, National Gallery of Art), a work likely inspired by the British painter’s memorable full-length of Pinkie (1794; San Marino, Huntington Library and Art Gallery), and in his arresting self-portrait of 1906, now in the Uffizi Gallery, Florence, the city of Sargent’s birth.
Lawrence's critics have often observed that his impact on later 20th-century art was limited and that his influence lay chiefly in the field of photography, notably that of Cecil Beaton. If not always readily acknowledged by its practitioners, Lawrence's legacy has continued to loom large over the artistic psyche of subsequent generations of portrait painters (fig. 9) and photographers, his stagecraft and the barely disguised self-promotion of his subjects are still palpable in the carefully choreographed visual culture of today where the ubiquitous iPhone camera serves as an ever-ready substitute for the brush.
The restoration of Lawrence's reputation in the second half of the last century was largely due to the scholarship of Kenneth Garlick and Michael Levey, the former listing 885 portraits in his seminal catalogue raisonné of the artist’s work, published in 1989. Today the artist is championed as the finest European portraitist of his age and, as Bendor Grosvenor has rightly noted, nobody in the history of British art ‘could apply paint to canvas with more natural ability’ (The Invention of British Art, London, 2024, p. 293).
We are grateful to Lynn Roberts for her generous assistance with the cataloguing of the frame.
Sir Robert Ogden, C.B.E., Hon. L.L.D.
A proud Yorkshireman, Sir Robert built a business empire that encompassed quarrying, mining, manufacturing heavy engineering equipment and property – famously pioneering the transformation of the London Docklands. Philanthropy was central to Sir Robert’s ethos: he funded state-of-the-art cancer treatment centres in Harrogate and Northallerton, gifted a redundant school to the National Autistic Society to create the Robert Ogden School, and funded university scholarship schemes for hundreds of disadvantaged students from South Yorkshire. This support continues through the Sir Robert Ogden Charitable Foundation, founded with his second wife, Ana, and a new Macmillan Centre carrying his name will shortly open in York.
Sir Robert was a passionate follower of horseracing; he was crowned champion National Hunt owner three times, with legendary mounts such as See More Business, Voy Por Ustedes and Exotic Dancer racing in his celebrated mauve and pink colours. Shifting his focus to flat racing and breeding, he continued to enjoy success at the highest level, including with Amazing Maria, who won Group 1 races at Newmarket and Deauville, and Sans Frontieres who won the Irish St Leger in 2010.
The Duke of Wellington had first sat to Lawrence in the summer of 1814, in the wake of his victorious Peninsular Campaign against Napoleon's armies in Portugal and Spain. The challenge for Lawrence (fig. 1), Wellington's exact contemporary, was how to represent the greatest military hero of the day, a man feted as Europe's military saviour. In total Lawrence was to execute eight portraits of Wellington over a period of fifteen years and it is perhaps these portraits more than those of any other artist that have defined Wellington in visual terms for posterity.
Lawrence's first portraits of Wellington, respectively commissioned by Lord Charles Stewart, later 3rd Marquess of Londonderry (1778-1854), Wellington's one-time Adjutant-General who had served with him during the Peninsular Campaign, and the Prince Regent, are both ambitious and heroic full-lengths, in which the influence of Joshua Reynolds's portraits of famous military figures can be clearly discerned. The latter, conceived on a large scale (124 ½ x 96 in.) and exhibited at the Royal Academy in 1815, shows the Duke holding aloft the Sword of State which he carried at the thanksgiving service held at St Paul's Cathedral following Napoleon's final defeat at Waterloo on the 7th July 1815 (Royal Collection). In it Wellington proudly stands, adorned with the multiple honours bestowed upon him by the grateful rulers of Europe. Lawrence's translation of Wellington's heroism was to culminate in another majestic full-length portrait conceived on a grand scale (156 x 96 in.) which was commissioned by Henry, 3rd Earl Bathurst (1762-1834), Secretary of State for War and the Colonies (1812-27), and begun in 1817. In the Bathurst portrait, Wellington is shown mounted on his celebrated charger Copenhagen on the field of Waterloo in the uniform he wore at the battle (private collection).
When, however, the Duke came to commission a portrait for his friend and future sister-in-law Marianne Patterson (see following lot), he was content with a less obviously heroic representation, reflecting perhaps what Andrew Roberts has described as his being 'very vain about his lack of vanity' (A. Roberts, Napoleon and Wellington, London, 2001, p. 110). The resulting portrait (London, Apsley House; fig. 2) has more in common with the understatement which characterises the portrait which Francisco de Goya had executed of him in Madrid after the Battle of Salamanca in 1812 (London, National Gallery). On a more human and less grandiose format (36 x 28 in.) compared to the portraits Lawrence had executed previously, it shows Wellington in military uniform and with the Star and Ribbon of the Order of the Garter, and the Golden Fleece ribbon. The Apsley House picture is perhaps the greatest of all of Lawrence's portraits of Wellington steering, as Michael Levey comments, 'adroitly between extremes of grandeur and ordinariness, managing to convey - without any hint of swaggering - an air of supreme self-confidence' (op. cit., p. 26).
Painted in 1820, the present portrait is traditionally believed to have been commissioned by Wellington's close friends, Charles and Harriet Arbuthnot, whom he met in Paris in 1814, although it may have been commissioned by the Duke himself and gifted to them. Charles Arbuthnot (1767-1850), a diplomat and politician, had served in important roles in Sweden and Portugal, and for a short while as Under Secretary for Foreign Affairs, before the diplomatic assignment for which he is chiefly remembered, as Ambassador Extraordinary to Constantinople. There he was involved in diplomatic duelling with Napoleon's envoy General Sebastiani which resulted ultimately in the British fleet forcing the Dardanelles. He subsequently returned to England to become Joint Secretary of the Treasury, but his influence extended beyond his formal government role on account of his popularity across the political spectrum. Grenville commented in his memoirs that he was 'more largely mixed up with the principal people and events of his time than any other man'. One of Wellington's closest friends, he married as his second wife Harriet Fane, daughter of the Hon. Henry Fane, of Fulbeck Hall, Lincolnshire, second son of the 8th Earl of Westmoreland, who was herself to become one of Wellington's closest confidantes. Indeed, between 1820 and 1834 she received no fewer than 1,488 letters from Wellington (see C. Wellesley, op. cit., p. 60). After her premature death in 1835, Charles Arbuthnot was to live the remaining fifteen years of his life in the company of Wellington at the Duke's London home, Apsley House.
Twenty-six years her husband's junior, Harriet Arbuthnot (fig. 3) thrived on the political world that her marriage opened up to her and politics became the passion of her life. A staunch Tory, her vivacity is clearly conveyed in the portrait of her which Lawrence exhibited at the Royal Academy in 1817 (present whereabouts unknown; see Garlick, op. cit., 1989, no. 42), the same year in which Wellington commissioned a portrait of Marianne Patterson (see following lot). Both Marianne’s portrait and one of Harriet were hung alongside the Apsley House half-length of Wellington for the 2022 exhibition: Wellington, Women and Friendship. Harriet’s diaries, eventually published long after her death, in 1950, shed light on many of the principal figures of the day including Canning, Castlereagh, Wellington, Liverpool and Peel. The intimate portrait that she gives of Wellington in which she shows herself to be affectionate and admiring of him but not blind to his imperfections, did much to balance other accounts which had often cast him as cold and unapproachable. In her diaries he appears, although plain spoken, as good-natured and popular with his friends and even shows himself open to her political opinions.
The present work stands out among Lawrence's portraits of Wellington for the plainness of its conception and its intimacy, which seems to reflect the close relationship between Wellington and the Arbuthnots, and mirrors to an extent the private side of the hero which Harriet reveals in her diaries. Unlike the more obviously heroic portraits that had preceded it, the Duke is shown in civilian clothes rather than military uniform, and a military cloak, with only the inclusion of the Insignia of the Golden Fleece (a unique honour for somebody neither royal nor Roman Catholic) alluding directly to the scale of his military achievements. A drawing in black and white chalk, now in the National Portrait Gallery, London (c.1820), shows Wellington in the same pose and was presumably executed by Lawrence prior to taking up the brush for the present portrait.
In her diary Harriet Arbuthnot recorded that 'The Duke of Wellington is going to sit to Lawrence for us' in an entry on the 22 June 1820 and later that year mentioned that 'the Duke had been sitting for our picture to Lawrence ...' (8 October 1820; op. cit., pp. 25 and 41). The portrait was finished by the end of the year and Harriet Arbuthnot, who had not seen it before, recorded her reaction to it in her diary. Not only was she 'delighted with it' but she considered it 'more like him than any picture I ever saw of him and quite different...' remarking that while 'All other pictures of him depict him as a hero this portrait has all the softness and sweetness of countenance which characterises him when he is in the private society of his friends' and noting also that 'the cloak is just like the Duke wears it, and the hand remarkably like!' (op. cit. pp. 58-9).
The Duke shared her enthusiasm for the portrait, writing to her in November 1820 that it 'is as good as any Lawrence ever painted' and later to the Duchess of Northumberland in a letter of 13 May 1837 that 'Mr. Arbuthnot's picture is one of the best if not the best that he ever painted'. His favourable reaction to it was reflected in the fact that, in the form of the mezzotint by Cousins, it was the portrait of himself that he chose most often when giving likenesses of himself to favoured friends, thereby becoming one of the best known images of him.
In 1822, during his third year as President, Lawrence exhibited a procession of outstanding works at the Academy's annual exhibition. His portrait of Wellington was widely praised, with one reviewer writing:
We have never witnessed before so fine a likeness of England's matchless hero; the eye is so uncommonly well delineated, so expressive, so truly characteristic of the valorous spirit that actuates the original, that it is not long before the spectator can cease regarding this exquisite picture, and when once regarded with attention, we will venture to say it can never be forgotten,
''While memory holds her seat.''
[La Belle Assemblée, August 1822]
That year Lawrence also showed his coronation full-length of King George IV - in the robes designed by the regent himself (1821; Royal Collection), the gloriously romantic half-length of the Russian general, Mikhail Vorontsov (1821; Saint Petersburg, Hermitage Museum), and his portrait of the novelist and literary hostess Marguerite Gardiner, Countess of Blessington (1822; London, Wallace Collection; fig. 4). The last of these must surely be counted among the finest female portraits of Lawrence's entire career. Ironically, the undisputed star attraction of the Academy's exhibition that year was a picture commissioned by the Duke of Wellington; such was the popularity of David Wilkie's Chelsea Pensioners reading the Waterloo Dispatch (1816; London, Apsley House) that a rail had to be installed to protect the painting from the thronging crowds.
Lawrence’s portrait of Wellington remained in the possession of the Arbuthnot family until it was sold at Christie's in 1878, when it was acquired by Archibald Primrose, 5th Earl of Rosebery (1847-1929). Rosebery, who had married Hannah de Rothschild, daughter of Baron Mayer de Rothschild, and reputedly the richest heiress in England, in March that year, was to form a celebrated collection of historical portraits, while pursuing a political career that culminated in him becoming Prime Minister in 1894. The portrait was later sold by Archibald, 6th Earl of Rosebery, at Christie's in May 1939, as one of the highlights of an important collection of pictures, when it was acquired by W.U. Goodbody, in the possession of whose family it remained until the sale at Christie’s in 2006.
THE FRAME
Throughout his career Lawrence remained famously fastidious over the framing of his work. In a letter sent to one of his sitters in 1828, he wrote, ‘A good frame… should be sufficiently broad and rich, but the ornament of that richness composed throughout of small parts, and usually it should be unburnished.’ The frame for his portrait of Wellington was made by Michael Tijou (active 1795, d1835/6), whose family belonged to the group of carvers and gilders of Huguenot descent - including the Pelletiers, the Gossets, and Paul Petit – that had escaped France and taken refuge in London following the Revocation of the Edict of Nantes in 1685. Tijou is documented as having supplied frames for Lawrence from circa 1816 to 1822. However, from 1802, he held premises at Greek Street where Lawrence himself lived from 1797 until 1813, thus making an earlier association highly probable.
The profile and decoration of the present frame compare very closely with those of the frame for the Countess of Blessington portrait (see fig. 4), also exhibited at the Academy in 1822, and with that supplied for Lawrence's magnificent unfinished head study in profile of George IV (c.1814; London, National Portrait Gallery). Both the Wellington and Blessington frames were conceivably among the last that Tijou supplied Lawrence as the following year the artist began his association with the frame maker George Morant. Lawrence died owing Tijou £68. 10s. 6d., the sum of which was paid by his estate in 1830. Interestingly, Tijou bought several works at the artist's posthumous studio sales, including the first lot from the acclaimed group of eighteen works in chalk on prepared canvas sold at Christie’s on 17-19 June 1830 (see following lot).
LAWRENCE'S LEGACY
At the Paris Salon of 1824, Lawrence received the Légion d'honneur and was feted as one of the leading revolutionaries to overturn all the established restrictions of classicism that had long dominated painting in France. By 1827 the young Stendhal announced, 'The English manner enjoys a triumph in Paris... Mr Lawrence's name is immortal'. This period was unquestionably a high-water mark for the painter’s career, but the trajectory of this child prodigy son of a Bristol innkeeper would prove to be as remarkable as the subsequent reputational descent following his sudden death in January 1830. His portraits were quickly and inextricably linked with George IV's reign, which ended with the king's death in June of the same year and became, as Michael Levey put it, 'a by-word for vanity, dissipation and excess' (op. cit., 2005, p. 1).
Today, it is apposite that Lawrence's immediate artistic legacy is best appreciated not at Tate Britain, the nation's museum dedicated to British art, but at the National Gallery. On entering the Central Hall, the visitor encounters three full-length portraits along the East wall; Lawrence's iconic 'Red Boy' of Charles William Lambton (1825; fig. 5), Eugene Delacroix's portrait of Louis-Auguste Schwiter (1826-1830; fig. 6) and John Singer Sargent's Lord Ribblesdale (1902; fig. 7). In this pantheon of Western painting, where Lawrence's status as the most talented portraitist of his age is left in no doubt, his influence on contemporary and later artistic luminaries is equally eloquent.
Delacroix was not the only contemporary French painter to admire Lawrence's virtuosic handling of paint. Théodore Géricault (1791-1824), one of the pioneers of Romanticism in France, visited London in 1820-21, where he attended the annual Royal Academy dinner at Lawrence's invitation. While Géricault's sublime series of ten paintings of the insane (fig. 8), executed soon after his return to France in 1821, are on an altogether different psychological plane to the images of Regency England, the fluent brushwork surely betrays the impact of his recent encounter with Lawrence's portraiture.
Delacroix's canvas of the young artist Louis-Auguste Schwiter constitutes an altogether more overt homage to Lawrence. The leader of the French Romantic school, Delacroix had visited the British artist in London in the spring of 1825, the period in which Lawrence had written to his sister, declaring that he had 'never painted better'. Schwiter, a portraitist and staunch Anglophile who is known to have made a copy of Lawrence's likeness of Benjamin West, is shown as the archetypal contemporary dandy, dressed simply in black. The National Gallery picture, which marked Delacroix's first foray into full-length portraiture and the first to be set in an outdoor landscape, was later acquired by Edgar Degas for the Impressionist painter's own collection. Delacroix ranked Lawrence more highly than Sir Anthony van Dyck, observing that the British artist's sitters 'really live; they can walk, move'. In what proved to be a neat historical vignette, following the opening of the Salon in 1827 Delacroix wrote to Schwiter, encouraging his friend to return to Paris so that he could see Lawrence's portrait of Lambton, a work he had greatly admired but until then only known through the engraving.
If Lawrence had provided the defining images of the Regency period, John Singer Sargent did the same for Edwardian England and contemporary American society. Sargent’s fluent style was greatly informed by his study of the old masters from Tintoretto to Velázquez and Lawrence, all painters known for the rapidity of their brush. The American’s 1904 portrait of Lord Londonderry and his page (Boston, Museum of Fine Arts) was painted in direct response to Lawrence’s 1815 full-length of Wellington, executed for the Waterloo Chamber at Windsor Castle. Further evidence of Sargent’s admiration for Lawrence can be seen in his portrait of Mathilde Townsend (1907; Washington, National Gallery of Art), a work likely inspired by the British painter’s memorable full-length of Pinkie (1794; San Marino, Huntington Library and Art Gallery), and in his arresting self-portrait of 1906, now in the Uffizi Gallery, Florence, the city of Sargent’s birth.
Lawrence's critics have often observed that his impact on later 20th-century art was limited and that his influence lay chiefly in the field of photography, notably that of Cecil Beaton. If not always readily acknowledged by its practitioners, Lawrence's legacy has continued to loom large over the artistic psyche of subsequent generations of portrait painters (fig. 9) and photographers, his stagecraft and the barely disguised self-promotion of his subjects are still palpable in the carefully choreographed visual culture of today where the ubiquitous iPhone camera serves as an ever-ready substitute for the brush.
The restoration of Lawrence's reputation in the second half of the last century was largely due to the scholarship of Kenneth Garlick and Michael Levey, the former listing 885 portraits in his seminal catalogue raisonné of the artist’s work, published in 1989. Today the artist is championed as the finest European portraitist of his age and, as Bendor Grosvenor has rightly noted, nobody in the history of British art ‘could apply paint to canvas with more natural ability’ (The Invention of British Art, London, 2024, p. 293).
We are grateful to Lynn Roberts for her generous assistance with the cataloguing of the frame.
Sir Robert Ogden, C.B.E., Hon. L.L.D.
A proud Yorkshireman, Sir Robert built a business empire that encompassed quarrying, mining, manufacturing heavy engineering equipment and property – famously pioneering the transformation of the London Docklands. Philanthropy was central to Sir Robert’s ethos: he funded state-of-the-art cancer treatment centres in Harrogate and Northallerton, gifted a redundant school to the National Autistic Society to create the Robert Ogden School, and funded university scholarship schemes for hundreds of disadvantaged students from South Yorkshire. This support continues through the Sir Robert Ogden Charitable Foundation, founded with his second wife, Ana, and a new Macmillan Centre carrying his name will shortly open in York.
Sir Robert was a passionate follower of horseracing; he was crowned champion National Hunt owner three times, with legendary mounts such as See More Business, Voy Por Ustedes and Exotic Dancer racing in his celebrated mauve and pink colours. Shifting his focus to flat racing and breeding, he continued to enjoy success at the highest level, including with Amazing Maria, who won Group 1 races at Newmarket and Deauville, and Sans Frontieres who won the Irish St Leger in 2010.