P ainted between 1826 and 1828, in the last decade of Lawrence’s career, this captivating work portrays a young girl reclining in a landscape with a pet spaniel. A masterpiece of the artist’s maturity, it must be counted among his supreme achievements as a painter of children’s portraits. The young sitter, Julia Beatrice Peel, then seven years old, was the eldest daughter of the eminent British statesman Sir Robert Peel (1788-1850), then Home Secretary and later Prime Minister in both 1834 and between 1841-1846. A highly distinguished collector and connoisseur, Peel was an enthusiastic patron of Lawrence, commissioning several family portraits from him. By the time this portrait was exhibited at the Royal Academy in 1828, Lawrence was its President and the outstanding portraitist of his generation, an extraordinarily talented artist whose bravura and virtuoso style had made him one of the most famous painters in Europe. In this portrait of the young Miss Peel his remarkable mastery of color and impressionistic brushwork is vividly evident. Lawrence’s portraits of children have always been considered among his most popular works. They epitomize the process by which naturalistic and unaffected portrayals such as this, concentrating on the carefree innocence and sweetness of childhood, had supplanted the more formal likenesses of previous generations.

Lawrence portrays the young sitter wearing a bright pink dress and sitting on the ground in a sunlit summery landscape. Cradling a spaniel, she smiles unaffectedly at the viewer and holds out a hand for the dog to lick. Above her a large red awning tied to a tree offers shade. Her features are carefully worked up with Lawrence’s customary skill, in contrast with the red and pink color harmonies in the dress and the blues and whites in the sky, which are handled with a noticeable freedom. The same is true of the landscape itself, a reminder of Lawrence’s considerable skill in this aspect of his work. Lawrence was reputedly very much at ease with younger sitters, and here perfectly captures Julia’s ingenuous good nature. The spaniel in her lap was not, in fact, a Peel family pet, but belonged to John Knowles, the biographer of Henry Fuseli, and was evidently a trusted “model” chosen by Lawrence himself. In Miss Peel’s seated outdoors pose, Lawrence may have been influenced by works such as the Age of Innocence, circa 1785-1788 (London, Tate Gallery, inv. no. N00307) or Miss Jane Bowles, circa 1775 (fig. 1), in which the sitter also holds a dog, both painted by Sir Joshua Reynolds (1723-1792), his great predecessor as a painter of children.

Much more significant, however, is the present canvas’s relationship with another masterful Lawrence portrait from almost the same date: Charles William Lambton (fig. 2), often called “The Red Boy”—painted in 1825 and today in London’s National Gallery. The young Master Lambton, then either six or seven, similarly reclines in a romantic moonlit landscape. Wearing a red suit, he looks not at the spectator, but upward as if in a dreamy reverie. In the young sitters’ comfortable contemporary dress—so far removed from the Van Dyck costumes of the eighteenth century—both portraits perfectly encapsulate the new admiration for childhood innocence and must be considered two of Lawrence’s greatest achievements in this vein.

Julia Beatrice Peel’s likeness was one of a group of family portraits commissioned by her father Sir Robert from Lawrence around this date.¹ These included his own portrait and that of his father, the first Baronet, both executed in 1825, and the famous second portrait of his wife Julia, Lady Peel (1795-1859; fig. 3), painted in 1826-1827 at the same time as the present canvas and today in The Frick Collection, New York.² Begun in 1826, the portrait of Julia Beatrice was not exhibited at the Royal Academy until two years later in 1828, presumably so that it could hang alongside a group of portraits of mothers and their children that Lawrence was showing that year (fig. 4).³ In total four of his eight submissions in 1828 contained children, with only Julia Beatrice portrayed without her mother.⁴ The portrait was well received; the critic in The Athenaeum, for example, described it as “a sweet thing, full of animation and innocence,”⁵ while that for Bells Weekly Messenger opined that the portrait was “one of those delightful paintings in which [Lawrence] gives the simplicity and playfulness of infancy in their most beautiful forms.”⁶

After its exhibition, Julia’s portrait was returned to Lawrence’s studio. Peel may have raised concerns about the portrait’s lack of “finish” and perhaps hoped that the canvas might be worked up further. Lawrence, however, wrote to him on 28 July: “I am unwilling to disturb its present unity of effect and execution, and intentionally leave very subordinate parts with less character of finishing, because the appearance of facility is not undesirable, where the essential details of the work have received obvious care and attention.”⁷ This passage reveals a great deal about Lawrence’s attitude to his art, especially later in life when his commitment to achieving what he called the necessary “air of accident and unfinish” was not always well understood by his contemporaries. In its mixture of both careful finish and exceptional freedom of brushwork, his portrait of Julia Peel perfectly encapsulated these principles.

Once back from Lawrence’s studio, it seems that Julia’s portrait hung in Peel’s newly built townhouse—complete with a picture gallery—in Whitehall Gardens, where the family moved in 1825. Gustav Waagen saw the painting there and described the canvas as “the charming portrait of a daughter of the late Sir Robert Peel taken as a child.” It is not clear exactly when the work was sent to Peel’s country seat at Drayton Manor in Tamworth, where it remained until sold in 1907. In 1841 Julia married George Augustus Frederick Villiers (1808-1859), 6^th Earl of Jersey, and then in 1865, Charles Brandling (1833-1894) of Middleton Hall in Yorkshire.

¹ See Garlick 1989, pp. 250-251, cat. nos. 636-638.

² In 1827 the painting was described by a contemporary critic as “among the highest achievements in modern art.”

³ In January 1826, Peel wrote his wife: “I suppose that little Julia had her second sitting today. Did she behave well, and is any other fixed by Sir Thomas for her to return to him?” See Peel 1920, p. 82.

⁴ The other portraits depicted the Marchioness of Londonderry with her son Lord Seaham; the Countess Gower with her daughters; and Lady Georgiana Agar Ellis with her young son Henry.

⁵ Athenaeum, 7 May 1828, p. 439.

⁶ “The Royal Academy,” in Bell’s Weekly Messenger, 11 May 1828, p. 151.

⁷ Lawrence to Peel, 28 July 1828. See D.E. Williams, The Life and Correspondence of Sir Thomas Lawrence, London 1831, vol. I, p. 55; vol. II, p. 483.