Artware Fineart has dated this Regency Portrait Oil Painting to the 19th Century.
Portrait of Master Charles William Lambton 'The Red Boy' (1818- 1831)
oil on canvas
33 x 25 in. (84 x 64 cm.)
After the picture in a private collection.
Notes
The portrait attracted much praise when it was exhibited in Paris in 1827. It has frequently graced tins of toffees and shortbread, and in 1969 appeared on the British 4d postage stamp. Wordsworth, the great poet of remembered childhood, said of The Red Boy when it was first exhibited: “Lawrence’s portrait of young Lambton is a wretched histrionic thing; the public taste must be vitiated indeed, if that is admired.” A recent art critic in the London Observer noted dryly: “Lawrence painted children the way Disney does deer.” Charles Lambton would die tragiclly aged thirteen. He is a child who will never live to grow up. Moreover we learn that he was quickly assumed to be an imaginary portrait of the dreaming youthful Byron, the very soul of English Romanticism. This was partly why he was reproduced across Europe, and then America, as a symbol of eternal hope and youthful promise. The original portrait remains in the collection of the Lampton Family.
Artist Biography
Sir Thomas Lawrence, (1769–1830), painter and draughtsman, chiefly of portraits, was born on 13 April 1769 at 6 Redcross Street, Bristol, the youngest of the five surviving children of Thomas Lawrence (1725–1797), then a supervisor of excise, and Lucy (1731?–1797), younger daughter of the Revd William Read and his wife, Sarah, née Hill. Through her father Lucy Lawrence was related to the Read family of Brocket Hall, Hertfordshire, and she had connections through her mother with other county families. As many as perhaps eleven other children were born to her between 1754 and 1772, but all died in infancy.
To a most unusual degree, childhood and early activity were synonymous in the life of Lawrence. His father moved from Bristol to Devizes in 1773, becoming landlord of the Black Bear, a well-known coaching inn of the London–Bath road. Within two or three years the very young Lawrence had revealed his talent for drawing, being capable particularly of sketching, in pencil, likenesses of people.
Visitors to Lawrence's father's inn included numerous social and cultural personalities, and the boy was much noticed by them—for his own sake and through the efforts of his proud, pretentious, and probably over-persistent father. Profile portraits in pencil of Lord and Lady Kenyon, who stayed at the Black Bear in 1779, document Lawrence's ability at that date (1779; priv. coll.). He would remain continuously at work as an artist for the subsequent fifty years, until the day before he died.
The boy Lawrence was early noticed, additionally, because of his handsome appearance and his gift for reciting verse, from Shakespeare and Milton. Fanny Burney recorded in April 1780 that she had found at the inn ‘a most lovely boy of ten years of age’ (Diary and Letters, 1.304), who possessed an astonishing skill in drawing. Mrs Lawrence informed her that he had already visited London and been pronounced a genius by Sir Joshua Reynolds. Another, more frequent visitor, David Garrick, seems to have seriously considered that the future career of the boy (not quite ten at Garrick's death) lay between painting and the stage.
Although early and usefully conditioned in social behaviour, with manners that were to be commented on later by contemporaries as extremely, if not excessively, polished, Lawrence received little formal general education. In adulthood, he wrote of his regret that his parents, for all their love, had not provided their son with ‘two or three parts in ed
Artware Fineart has dated this Regency Portrait Oil Painting to the 19th Century.
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After Sir Thomas Lawrence , Pra, 1769–1830 Portrait of Master Charles William Lambton 'The Red Boy' (1818- 1831)
