Sir Thomas Lawrence (1769-1830) was the leading portrait painter of the Regency period and the fourth President of the Royal Academy. Born in Bristol, the son of an innkeeper, he was almost entirely self-taught, and his precocity was remarkable: by the age of ten, while his father kept the Black Bear inn at Devizes, he was already producing accomplished pencil and pastel portraits of the inn's guests, and supporting his family with the proceeds. The family later moved to Bath, where Lawrence continued to build his reputation, before he moved to London at eighteen and quickly established himself as a portrait painter in oils, receiving his first royal commission, a portrait of Queen Charlotte, in 1789 or 1790.
Lawrence's rise was rapid: he was elected an Associate of the Royal Academy in 1791 and a full Academician in 1794, and on the death of Sir Joshua Reynolds in 1792 he succeeded him as Painter-in-Ordinary to George III. His flattering, glamorous and technically brilliant portraits, executed with a virtuoso handling of paint that captured both a striking likeness and the glamour of Regency high society, made him the most sought-after portraitist of his generation, and his sitters included tragic actresses, society beauties and close friends alongside royalty and the aristocracy. Following the death of the portraitist John Hoppner in 1810, Lawrence gained the patronage of the Prince Regent, who knighted him in 1815 and, in 1818, sent him to the political congresses of Aix-la-Chapelle and Vienna to paint the allied sovereigns, statesmen and military leaders responsible for the defeat of Napoleon; the resulting series of twenty-four full-length portraits now hangs together in the Waterloo Chamber at Windsor Castle, a unique record of the period and the achievement that secured Lawrence's reputation as the foremost portrait painter in Europe. He was elected President of the Royal Academy in 1820, a post he held until his death.
Beyond his own painting, Lawrence was a distinguished connoisseur and collector of Old Master drawings, assembling one of the finest such collections ever formed by a private individual, including works by Michelangelo and Raphael that are now held by the British Museum and the Ashmolean Museum. He was also an early and influential supporter of the acquisition of the Elgin Marbles for the nation and played a role in the founding of the National Gallery, of which he was among the first trustees. Despite his commercial success, Lawrence died insolvent in 1830, his collection sold off piecemeal to settle his debts.
John Mitchell Fine Paintings' portrait by Lawrence, of Mrs Charles William Ward, née Jane Nash Linley, exemplifies the elegant, socially assured portraiture for which he remains celebrated, capturing a sitter from precisely the fashionable London and Bath society in which Lawrence made his name. As the last of the great English portrait painters in the tradition established by Reynolds and Gainsborough, Lawrence remains a significant figure among the gallery's British portrait holdings.