Forget the glimpse of stocking, what really shocked Regency England in 1790 was teeth.
Lustrous, carnivorous and tantalizingly exposed between a pair of moist red lips, these particular teeth belonged to the actress Elizabeth Farren, whose portrait opens the Yale Center for British Art's luscious new exhibit, "Thomas Lawrence: Regency Power and Brilliance."
This is not the sexiest painting Lawrence (1769-1830) ever painted. There are plenty of contenders, including the hunky "John, Lord Mountstuart," just adjacent, who looks as if he has been poured into a pair of Spandex leggings and caressed by a salmon-lined cape. If Mountstuart exudes a moody bravura, balancing daringly on a cliff [--] as the cobalt sea churns beneath him [--] Farren is his coquettish match, embalmed in a fox-trimmed translucent white cloak, caught mid-step as she strides mischievously across a summer field. Showing even a hint of teeth in the 18th century was the province of the mad, the crass and the lustful [--] so Farren's flirty peak made her particularly inviting. Portraits like Farren's led the banker-poet Sam Rogers to quip that if he wanted his wife painted he would go to the capable Thomas Phillips, but "if I wanted my mistress painted I would go to Lawrence."
When Lawrence, the self-taught son of an innkeeper, burst onto the London scene at the end of the 18th century, these sorts of elegant but erotic stunners were what brought him immediate fame. By 20, he was painting Queen Charlotte with unusual candor. By 22, he was elected to the Royal Academy. By 23, he was appointed Painter-in-Ordinary to King George III. By his mid-40s, he was a baronet, roundly considered the heir apparent to the redoubtable Sir Joshua Reynolds.
Lawrence's brilliance stands in contrast to his mid-century branding as a "chocolate-box painter." His doughy, adorable children, all apple-cheeked and fleshy, romping with dogs, play-acting in the forest and lolling about in rich velvet suits, had enough sentimentality to choke a nursery school teacher. Though there is blame enough to go around for 19th-century British schmaltz, Thomas Lawrence could reasonably be charged with leading the charge of the lite brigade.
As the London Observer wrote, "Lawrence painted children the way Disney does deer."
So the curators of this splendid show [--] jointly organized with the National Portrait Gallery in London [--] are to be commended for hauling old Lawrence out of the candy box and out onto the walls again. This canny reassessment does not shy away from Lawrence's excesses, but it reminds viewers of the dash, dexterity and exciting innovations he brought to the canvas in the pre-Victorian era. He may not have had the expressive agency of J.M.W. Turner or the breathtaking atmospherics of John Constable, but Lawrence had something else: a boldness and candor brought to an age of tumult when society itself seemed on the brink of collapse.
We think today of regency England (roughly 1789 to Queen Victoria's ascension in 1837) as the time of Austen and Mozart and classical symmetry. But the fall of the Bastille in 1789, the execution of Louis XVI in 1793 and the onrush of Napoleon's armies had England and Europe terrified that their centuries-old system of power was on the verge of collapse.
Lawrence, a child prodigy who had been charging for his portraits since he was 11, strode into this turmoil with a poise and cockiness perfectly suited for an anxious age. His portraits don't just come alive, they invade your space. They dare you to meet them head on, with a cool, almost defiant confidence that is as unnerving as it is magnetic. His backgrounds are stormy, with deep and abrupt contrasts that lend his subjects an air of immediacy and potency.
Look at the arrogance of "Arthur Atherley," one of Lawrence's most celebrated portraits. The young man doffs his hat with his left hand while placing his right, gloved hand, defiantly on his right hip. He stares directly at the viewer with huge cobalt eyes, his cheeks flushed with red, his mouth truculent and cocky. This is a 20-year-old who seems to say, "You want a piece of me?" Lawrence paints him in his favorite colors [--] a rich crimson, deep blue and dazzling white.
The sense of the primal is repeatedly enhanced by Lawrence's affection for ruby, cobalt and white, often applied with thick daubs of paint that seem to have been hurled on the canvas. Few other painters outside of Sargent have used white with such audacity. It is on fetching display in "Catherine Rebecca Gray," a peculiar full-length portrait of a pale, elegant woman descending a marble staircase, a peacock preening behind her. Mirroring the bird's pose, she holds a pink rose between her finger and thumb, her sapphire eyes in blazing contrast to her diaphanous, alabaster frock.
This is a show-off picture, a bit like the kind the Dutch used to paint in the 16th century.
But a more virtuosic example of Lawrence's adroitness with white is in his portrait of Isabella Wolff. This sumptuous portrait of a woman, most likely his mistress, draws its composition from Michelangelo's image of "Night," at the Medici Chapel. In it, Wolff, her auburn tresses fitfully tucked into a gold silk cap, rests her elbow on a pillow, absorbed in the examination of an open book. The woman's alabaster skin, her long, strong neck, patrician nose and high, rosy cheekbones suggest access to the sitter's private thoughts.
That sort of unfettered access to female sensibilities, which Lawrence achieves with a flurry of flicks and daubs of paint, curator A. Cassandra Albinson argues, "suggest, through the visual language of paint, that [Lawrence] had unfettered access to his sitter and was working directly from the motif."
Women take on a sense of their own sexual agency in Lawrence's portraits, just as men take on their own political agency. Lawrence's penchant for investing his portraits with a sense of theatricality and energy, often purposely leaving backgrounds unfinished, create a flamboyant sense of potency that makes the sitters forceful enough to triumph over the fraught temper of the time.
With the defeat of Napoleon, Lawrence spent time in Europe, then in thrall to the radiant, highly finished paintings of Jean Auguste Dominique Ingres. Lawrence's dashing color contrasts, his sketchy, halting, epigrammatic brush strokes, and, above all, the psychic intensity with which he rendered his subjects, put off many of the stuffy Salon stalwarts but engaged romantics like Eugène Delacroix. While Lawrence, the French painter wrote in 1829, "could be blamed for sometimes pushing to the point of affectation the search for striking and unexpected contrasts he still captivates; his picture is a kind of diamond which glitters all alone where it is and obscures everything around it."
Lawrence was, by turns, a proto-Romantic and Victorian sentimentalist. He broke the boundary between sitter and viewer and created a new generation of women whose elegance was invigorated by their own sensuality. His portraits of swaggering Adonises (including the portly George Regent, who was anything but) generated just the sort of moxie and patriotism England likely needed with Napoleon breathing down its neck.
If he was a "chocolate box artist," says Lucy Peltz, curator of 18th-century portraits at the National Portrait Gallery, it was only because his works were so heartily embraced. "We lost the ability to love Lawrence because we became cynical and ironic and post-modern," she says. "If we are now beyond post-modernism, then the moment seems ripe to reappraise Lawrence and for people to fully experience his love of paint, surface, color, personality, and materiality."
But a more virtuosic example of Lawrence's adroitness with white is in his portrait of Isabella Wolff. This sumptuous portrait of a woman, most likely his mistress, draws its composition from Michelangelo's image of "Night," at the Medici Chapel. In it, Wolff, her auburn tresses fitfully tucked into a gold silk cap, rests her elbow on a pillow, absorbed in the examination of an open book. The woman's alabaster skin, her long, strong neck, patrician nose and high, rosy cheekbones suggest access to the sitter's private thoughts.
That sort of unfettered access to female sensibilities, which Lawrence achieves with a flurry of flicks and daubs of paint, curator A. Cassandra Albinson argues, "suggest, through the visual language of paint, that [Lawrence] had unfettered access to his sitter and was working directly from the motif."
Women take on a sense of their own sexual agency in Lawrence's portraits, just as men take on their own political agency. Lawrence's penchant for investing his portraits with a sense of theatricality and energy, often purposely leaving backgrounds unfinished, create a flamboyant sense of potency that makes the sitters forceful enough to triumph over the fraught temper of the time.
With the defeat of Napoleon, Lawrence spent time in Europe, then in thrall to the radiant, highly finished paintings of Jean Auguste Dominique Ingres. Lawrence's dashing color contrasts, his sketchy, halting, epigrammatic brush strokes, and, above all, the psychic intensity with which he rendered his subjects, put off many of the stuffy Salon stalwarts but engaged romantics like Eugène Delacroix. While Lawrence, the French painter wrote in 1829, "could be blamed for sometimes pushing to the point of affectation the search for striking and unexpected contrasts he still captivates; his picture is a kind of diamond which glitters all alone where it is and obscures everything around it."
Lawrence was, by turns, a proto-Romantic and Victorian sentimentalist. He broke the boundary between sitter and viewer and created a new generation of women whose elegance was invigorated by their own sensuality. His portraits of swaggering Adonises (including the portly George Regent, who was anything but) generated just the sort of moxie and patriotism England likely needed with Napoleon breathing down its neck.
If he was a "chocolate box artist," says Lucy Peltz, curator of 18th-century portraits at the National Portrait Gallery, it was only because his works were so heartily embraced. "We lost the ability to love Lawrence because we became cynical and ironic and post-modern," she says. "If we are now beyond post-modernism, then the moment seems ripe to reappraise Lawrence and for people to fully experience his love of paint, surface, color, personality, and materiality."
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