This life-sized family group, painted by Sir Thomas Lawrence in about 1817, is a prime example of his artistic practice as executed on a grand scale. By the 1810s, Lawrence was at the very height of his powers as the pre-eminent portraitist at work in Britain, if not Europe. He had, by this point, painted much of the royal family, including George III and the Prince of Wales, large swathes of the aristocracy, and many of the most eminent cultural and political figures of the day. To have any portrait painted by Lawrence was a great signifier of status, but to commission a family portrait on a monumental scale, in the ‘grand manner’, would have been accepted as a serious statement, not just of wealth and position, but of artistic and cultural intention.

Whilst, on the one hand, this portrait utilises much of the visual language of Reynolds and Gainsborough’s ‘grand manner’ portraits, especially in the architectural and landscape setting, on the other, it is a truly innovative and modern depiction of family life. The Cockerell portrait is a tour de force of Lawrentian painting; Lawrence was capable of seemingly effortless and dazzling brushwork. The fabrics, especially the crisp whites and deep, red velvets, are especially luxurious. The central mass of white drapery, which stands proud of the surrounding reds and background sky, demonstrates Lawrence’s skill as a colourist. As a result of this, the viewer’s eye is drawn immediately to the central group of the portrait, the figure of Harriet Rushout (c. 1772 – 1851), wife of Sir Charles Cockerell (1755 – 1837) and mother to Charles, Harriet-Anne and Elizabeth Maria Cockerell, all pictured here. Lawrence’s innovation is to make Harriet and her two young daughters the focal point of the portrait. It is her gaze that meets that of the viewer and not that of Sir Charles, the commissioner, who attends to the right of the canvas, looking proudly at his youngest daughter in his wife’s lap.

In the 17th and much of the 18th Century, family groups were often a line-up of family members, each individual standing in his or her own space looking out, rarely engaging with one another in a believable way. By the end of the 18th Century, however, group portraiture had fast become less formal. Compositions became less rigid and painters began to depict their subjects engaging with each other in more animated ways. If we compare the Lawrence portrait with a portrait painted of Cockerell with his first wife in India, we can see this dramatic shift taking place. Whilst the Renaldi portrait dates from circa 1789, it belongs stylistically to the mid-18th Century and, when viewed alongside the Lawrence, it suddenly appears rather lifeless and stiff.

By contrast, Lawrence places a mother’s tactile love for her children at the centre of this unforced, domestic arrangement. In our picture, the children behave like children, rather than standing to attention as miniature adults as in earlier portraiture conventions. Indeed, the young Charles in our portrait seems to pre-empt one of the most famous evocations of childhood in British painting, Lawrence’s Red Boy.

Sir Charles Cockerell, 1st Bt. was born in Somerset and, aged 21, sailed to India where he worked as an administrator in the East India Company. He rose through the ranks in Calcutta, befriending Warren Hastings and Richard Wellesley, 1st Marquess Wellesley, both of whom would hold the title of Governor-General of Bengal. He later became a partner of the preeminent Calcutta bank, Cockerell, Trail & Co. Cockerell returned to Britain in 1801 a wealthy man and sat as an MP from 1802 until his death in 1837. He owned land in Gloucestershire and had his town house at Hyde Park Corner, near Apsley House. He was created a baronet in 1809.

Cockerell’s first wife died in India only months after their marriage in 1789. Seven years after his return to Britain, he married his second wife, the Hon. Harriet Rushout. Harriet was the daughter of 1st Baron Northwick and sister to John Rushout, 2nd Baron Northwick, who assembled the great Northwick collection of art at Thirlestane House, Cheltenham.

Cockerell was himself a great patron of the arts, something to which this Lawrence portrait attests. His most famous artistic commission was, however, not a painting, but a house. Cockerell inherited the Sezincote estate in Gloucestershire on the death of his elder brother, and when he returned to England he engaged another of his brothers, the architect Samuel Pepys Cockerell (1753 – 1827), to build him a new house that paid tribute to his career in India and, by extension, acknowledged the source of his wealth. Sezincote House, finished in 1805, is a unique blend of Georgian country house, Hindu and Islamic Mughal architectural features and displays Cockerell’s sympathy for arts and culture of the Indian subcontinent. In his 1819 portrait by Hayter, Cockerell chose to show the Mughal dome of Sezincote House in the background. The gardens and grounds at Sezincote were designed by Cockerell’s ‘old Indian ally’, the artist Thomas Daniell, who had spent seven years working in India.

Lawrence’s great portrait of the Cockerell family remained at Sezincote House for over 100 years, until it was sold by Sir Charles’ great-grandson in 1922. The picture stayed in England before being sold in 1959 to the great collectors and philanthropists John and Joanna Bass, who bequeathed it to their Bass Museum of Art in Miami.