SIR THOMAS LAWRENCE AND STUDIO (BRISTOL 1769-1830 LONDON)
Portrait of Caroline Lady Suffield of Belton Hall in Grantham (died 1850), seated half-length, landscape beyond
inscribed 'Portrait of Caroline Lady Suffield, by Sir Tho.s Lawrence' (verso), bears label inscribed 'Lady Suffield of Belton Hall, Sir Thomas Lawrence' (verso)
oil on canvas
82 x 72 cm. (32 1/4 x 28 in.)

This portrait of Lady Caroline Hobart (d. 1850) by Sir Thomas Lawrence has only recently come to light. The composition repeats a three-quarter-length version of the canvas that was exhibited at the Royal Academy in 1793 painted when Lawrence was just twenty-four years old. This canvas remains in the collection of her descendants.¹ Lady Caroline was the second of the three daughters of John Hobart, 2nd Earl of Buckinghamshire (1723–93) and his first wife, Mary Anne Drury. At the death of her father she inherited the Blickling Estate, now the property of the National Trust.

The commission for both portraits must have been prompted by the sitter’s marriage to the Hon. William Assheton Harbord (1766–1821) on 4 June 1792 at St George’s, Hanover Square, London. He succeeded his father as 2^nd Baron Suffield on 4 February 1810. The larger version was probably intended for the sitter’s father, and the other for her husband.

Lawrence’s work was first shown at the Academy in 1790 and the bravura technique and the originality of his compositions were immediately admired and his portrait of Lady Caroline shows both these innovative characteristics. The unusual pose, the sitter’s head turned sharply to her right with her right elbow resting on a plinth and seated above a river landscape has Lawrence’s characteristic relaxed assurance while the handing of the head shows the painter’s distinctive energetic brushwork.

Although commissioned in 1793, neither of the portraits of Lady Caroline were delivered until after Lawrence’s death. Lawrence’s disorganized studio and the gout that killed Lord Buckinghamshire in August 1793 may have contributed to the amnesia regarding the portraits and the two canvases were included in a list of the contents of the studio by Lawrence’s executor, Archibald Knightley. The list totalled 430 items that included nearly 150 portraits, some of which were left unfinished. A manuscript entitled ‘Claims’, now in the Victoria and Albert Museum,² includes the two portraits as number 194 and the curious comment, ‘Orig[inal] & copy — both unfinished. about 1/2 ‘. The larger painting, which cost £52.10s, appears entirely autograph whereas the painting presently offered by Chiswick Auctions was left unfinished and completed by one of Lawrence’s assistants after his death. It was bought by the sitter for £26.5s. Both paintings were delivered to the sitter in November 1832.

The ‘Claims’ document described both paintings as ‘unfinished’ and, while the larger canvas in a private collection seems complete, this is a correct description of the canvas presently offered. The costume below the neckline and the background landscape do not have the detailed brushstrokes that enliven the face, the hand and the decorative ruff and these areas of the canvas are just blocked in. There is every reason to believe that Lawrence put the canvas aside in 1793, and neither he, nor his studio, ever touched the canvas again.

References

Kenneth Garlick, Sir Thomas Lawrence, Oxford 1989, p. 204, cat. no. 380, pl. 14.

National Art Library, call number 86.BB.49. The document has been transcribed by Kenneth Garlick in ‘A Catalogue of Paintings, Drawings and Pastels of Sir Thomas Lawrence’, Walpole Society, XXXIX, 1962–64, Appendix IV, pp. 274–317

Garlick 1964, p. 292

Provenance
Belton House, Lincolnshire; Private Collection,
thence by family decent

Literature
Kenneth Garlick in ‘A Catalogue of Paintings, Drawings and Pastels of Sir Thomas Lawrence’, Walpole Society, XXXIX, 1962–64, p. 292

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