Gilbert Stuart 1755-1828

The sitter was the only daughter of Thomas Freame, of Philadelphia, and his wife, Margaretta, the daughter of William Penn, the eponymous founder of Pennsylvania.  On 8th May 1770, she married as his second wife, Thomas Dawson.  A forntnight later he was created Baron Dartrey of Castle Dawson, County Monaghan, and in 1785 he was created Viscount Cremorne.

Lord Cremorne was a significant patron of Gilbert Stuart.  The two men probably met through Benjamin West of whom Cremorne was also a patron and in whose studio Stuart worked between 1775 and 1782.  Cremorne commissioned an important picture from West of Hagar and Ishmael which is now in the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York.  As a young man Lord Cremorne had taken the Grand Tour, arriving in Rome in 1751.  He was one of the Irish visitors to be caricatured by Reynolds in his Parody of the School of Athens, a work which is now in the National Gallery of Ireland.  

In Rome Lord Cremorne sat to Batoni, but it was not until some time later in 1785 that he sat to Gilbert Stuart, a portrait which was exhibited the same year at the Royal Academy.  The present picture was painted a couple of years later in Ireland, where Stuart had fled to in order to escape his creditors in London (William Whitley, Gilbert Stuart, 1932, p.78).  Cremorne later commissioned portraits of himself and his wife from Sir Thomas Lawrence, P.R.A. but it is a measure of the esteem in which he held Stuart's ability that Lord Cremorne is said to have lent Lawrence both the present portrait and the Royal Academy exhibit of 1785, in order that he might study them prior to beginning work (Charles Merrill Mount, Gilbert Stuart, 1964, p.137).  Lawrence's whole length portrait of Lady Cremorne is in the Tate Gallery, London.