Sold Without Reserve | SIR THOMAS LAWRENCE, P.R.A. | PORTRAIT OF WILLIAM HAMILTON, R.A., THREE-QUARTER-LENGTH; PORTRAIT OF MARY HAMILTON, R.A., THREE-QUARTER-LENGTH

Anonymous sale, London, Christie's, 6 May 1910, lot 76;

Henri Stettiner, 1911;

Anonymous sale, Paris, Hotel Drouot, 14 December 2005 (as by Gardner).

K. Garlick, “A Catalogue of the Paintings, Drawings and Pastels of Sir Thomas Lawrence,” Walpole Society, XXXIX, 1964, p. 261;

N. Jeffares, "Sir Thomas Lawrence", Dictionary of pastellists before 1800, London, 2006; online edition [http://www.pastellists.com/articles/lawrence.pdf], updated 8 October 2019, cat. nos. J.466.22 and J.466.221. 

Executed only one year after the young Lawrence moved to London, this pair of pastels depicts the artist William Hamilton, R.A. (1751-1801) and his wife Mary, née Aylward (and later Mrs. John Charles Denham). Hamilton, who was known for his theatrical paintings of subjects derived from plays and poems, became an associate member of the Royal Academy in 1784 and was inducted as a full member a year after these portraits were painted, in 1789. Sadly, Hamilton died of a fever at the age of fifty; in his will he left his portrait by Lawrence to his wife Mary. 

Lawrence was born in 1769 and was therefore less than twenty when he completed these portraits. Even at such a young age, he was admired for his precocious artistic talent. His parents ran a coaching inn near Bath and by the early 1780s he is known to have drawn travelers and their families who stopped at the inn. In 1787 he entered the Royal Academy in London, an institution of which he would later become president.