This exquisite portrait of a lady by Sir Thomas Lawrence was painted around 1805, when the artist was at the height of his powers. Executed with the characteristic elegance and sensitivity that define Lawrence’s mature style, this work exemplifies the painter’s ability to imbue his portraiture with a lyrical dimension, achieved here through the inclusion of a highly evocative landscape background.

This portrait depicts a yet unidentified lady, painted half-length and seated at a right angle to the viewer, her head turned to face us. The subject is clothed in a delicate white gown with gold necklaces and a flowing golden shawl, all of which are rendered with typical Lawrentian bravura brushwork and a luminous colour palette. She is seated in an arcade or window opening, with red velvet curtains and a stone balustrade, beyond which lies a nocturnal, wooded landscape.

The composition compares closely with two portraits from same period: Portrait of Louisa, Lady Wheatley and Portrait of Mrs Jeffrey Prendergast. Both pictures form a particularly striking comparison as their sitters are posed and dressed almost identically to the Dickinson portrait’s subject. They both wear the same white dress with lace collar and gold chains around her necks. Furthermore, their hands and arms are arranged in the same way as in ours; the right hand sits on her knee and her left hangs limp, supported by an elbow resting on a chair arm, painted in a brilliant scarlet in both the Wheatley portrait and ours. The only differences of note in our picture are the inclusion of a golden shawl and the fact the point at the lower edge of the canvas crops the sitter’s hand. This passage is of particular interest in our picture as it contains a small pentiment wherein it is possible to see two positions for the lady’s left wrist. Although our picture and the other two portrait were evidently painted at a similar moment, this evidence of Lawrence’s compositional indecision suggests that our picture might have been painted fractionally before the Wheatley one, which includes most of the hand. Kenneth Garlick dates the Wheatley portrait to around 1806 (the sitter wed that year), whilst the Prendergast picture was begun in 1801, meaning that he used this costume and pose for the first few years of the new century. All these factors point to a date of circa 1801-06 for our portrait.

The sitter in our portrait shares her fashionable neo-classical ‘empire line’ dress with many of Lawrence’s other sitters of the same period. Moreover, our subject sports a hairstyle consisting of a large bun and parted fringe, which was at least partially inspired by classical statuary and was very much in vogue during the opening years of the 19th Century.

Although Lawrence never worked as a painter of pure landscapes, he worked them into the majority of his pictures to a greater or lesser degree. In many of his pictures, he includes only a very small landscape vignette (sometimes of a recognisable view), or perhaps a sunset. He usually included a turbulent sky to add to add a sublime dimension to a painting. Whilst these conventions were relatively commonplace in British landscape painting of the period, Lawrence’s landscape backgrounds are painted with a vivacity and an individual flair the like of which is perhaps found only in portraits by Gainsborough, who was, unlike Lawrence, a landscapist in his own right. Lawrence’s landscape backgrounds are distinctive in both colouring and handling; this is never more evident than when he gave himself over to producing an imaginary landscape covering an entire canvas in which to situate his subject. A good example of this is 1792 portrait of Emma, Lady Hamilton. This landscape – a true tour de force – would not have been painted from life but rather invented in the studio. Lawrence painted in the details in thick, assured brushstrokes governed by instinct rather than topographical description. His colouring followed suit, with sharp, pure white passages picked out against dark shadows. He clearly delighted in the use of yellows, reds and russet in his landscape backgrounds – it is surely no coincidence that many of his best are autumnal.

This can all be observed in our portrait, whose landscape element is a rapidly painted nocturne. As in the Lady Hamilton portrait, Lawrence uses pure white paint to show moonlight reflected on water. The trees are painted with a similar speedy, nervous energy. All these factors combine to permeate the portrait with a lyrical, even mysterious atmosphere, perfectly fitting for a period during which Romanticism was infiltrating all kind of artforms.

Born in Bristol in 1769, Lawrence rose from humble beginnings – his father was an innkeeper – to become a child prodigy. He painted his celebrated portrait of Queen Charlotte in 1789, aged just twenty, and, by 1792, George III had appointed him as his Principal Painter in Ordinary. Known for his fluid painting style, dazzling colouring and dramatic compositions, Lawrence had, by the first decade of the 19th Century, firmly established himself as the preeminent portrait painter of late-Georgian Britain, succeeding Sir Joshua Reynolds and Thomas Gainsborough as the leading figure of the British school of painting. His stature was confirmed in 1815 when he was knighted by the Prince Regent and again in 1820 when he was elected President of the Royal Academy after Benjamin West’s death. Accordingly, Lawrence was one of the most in-demand portraitists throughout Europe. By his death in 1830, he had painted a pope, kings and queens, generals and politicians and a huge swathe of the British nobility and gentry.

We are grateful to Dr Frédéric Ogée and Dr Brian Allen for independently confirming the attribution to Sir Thomas Lawrence based on first-hand inspection.