Thomas Lawrence

“ When Sir Thomas Lawrence paints a handsome peeress, he does not contemplate her through a powerful microscope, and transfer to the canvass the pores of the skin, the bloodvessels of the eye, and all the other beauties which Gulliver discovered in the Brobdignagian maids of honour. ”

“ Life is harder for the young painter of genius than his contemporary musician of like age. It was not always so, and turning back to the history of England’s accepted artists, the name of Sir Thomas Lawrence, P.R.A., stands out as one of the most brilliant examples in the history of art, of untutored skill that came near to amounting to positive genius. ”

“ Thus Thomas Lawrence spekes to tymes ensving
That Death is sure, and Tyme is past reneving.”
Sir John Lawrence, Bart.—On a large ornamented tablet of black marble, against the east wall, is an inscription to the memory of Sir John Lawrence, Bart., who died in 1638, aged 50. Attached to it are these quaint lines:—
“When bad men dye and turn to their last sleep,
What stir the poets and engravers keep,
By a feigned skill to pile them up a name,
With terms of Good, and Just, out-lasting fame:
Alas! poor men, such most have need of stone
And epitaphs ”

“ We know that, by the time she was twenty, Sir Thomas Lawrence was so struck by her beauty that he immortalised it on canvas; but it is only in 1816 that the curtain is actually raised, and we find her living with her brother in London, where, to quote her sister,
"she received at her house only those whose age and character rendered them safe friends, and a very few others, on whose perfect respect and consideration she could wholly rely. ”

“ Sir Thomas Lawrence had all the qualities of personal manner and artistic style necessary to make a fashionable painter, and among English portrait painters he takes a high place, though not as high as that given to him in his lifetime. ”

“ It is a head of Colonel Wybrowe, but it is horrid."
"Artists themselves are the worst judges. Sir Thomas Lawrence began my grandfather, and left it half finished, dissatisfied. It is one of the cleverest things he ever painted." Then, with another of the rapid changes which were characteristic of his talk, "Do you care about politics? Do you ever come and listen to the debates?" ”

“ In his early youth at Bristol and Oxford, this ar [Pg 784] tist showed marked talent for portraiture, and became a pupil of Sir Joshua Reynolds at the Royal Academy. His delicate pastel portraits obtained great Sir Thomas Lawrence vogue in the most aristocratic circles of London. On the death of his master, Lawrence was appointed painter to the King. He became the fashionable portrait painter of the age. As such, Lawrence was summoned to Aix-la-Chapelle during the International Congress of 1818 to paint the various dignitaries of the Holy Alliance. ”

“ Naturally enough when this gift became recognised the artist’s studio was thronged by the prettiest women in London. Whatever their beauty, Lawrence would interpret it in terms of the utmost generosity. The charms transferred to canvas to defy the ravages of time were safe to be at least a little in excess of those that existed in the sitter. Praise and patronage are notoriously more difficult to fight against than neglect, and as time went on Sir Thomas turned more and more to the task of perfecting prettiness. ”

“ Others drifted in and out helping with demolitions, ciphering and deciphering telegrams, landing stores, pegging down wire roads in the sand and doing a hundred other odd jobs.
‘Mr. [Lowell Thomas] ’s cinema pictures were a triumph of journalistic composition. But they depicted only the earlier Lawrence of the heroic period and wrongly credited him with doing single-handed the whole of the later work of “Hedge-hog” and of Joyce and the British staff. ”

“ Lawrence was a man slight and frail, diffident, silent, and soft-spoken, who might have been taken offhand for the most bashful of youths, a most erudite scholar, an archæologist whom the war caught practising his profession among the antiquities of Assyria and Babylon. ”

“ As a child, John Lawrence went with his parents from Richmond to Guernsey, thence to Ostend where the father commanded a Veteran Battalion during the Waterloo campaign, and thence soon after 1815 to Clifton near Bristol. During his childhood he suffered severely from an affection of the eyes, the very ailment which, as we shall see hereafter, overshadowed his declining years. From Clifton he went to a day-school at College Green in Bristol, walking daily over the breezy uplands that then separated the two places, in company with his brother Henry, his elder by five years. ”

“ Circumstances and his own lifelong efforts have made him more free of human ties than other men. He can therefore dispose of himself in any market at any given time. Others cannot; they have careers, ambitions, families, wants, hopes, fears, traditions, duties—all binding them to that organized human society in which Lawrence seems to play only an accidental and perfunctory part. It is this extraordinary detachment, this final insulation of himself, which makes him the object of so much curiosity, suspicion, exasperation, admiration, love, hatred, jealousy, legends, lies. ”

“ Lawrence loses interest in his major characters. He must be on to pastures new.
“Aaron’s Rod” can scarcely be called a “good” novel. It contains many advanced ideas in the field of sociology which we found rather difficult to agree with. However, the world may in time grow up to Mr. Lawrence and until then we should seize the opportunity of reading his descriptions of luxurious interiors, and the Alps. They are remarkably able bits of writing.
Mr. Lawrence is an important novelist now, but it is in his power to do much better things than he has done so far. ”

“ Why then, we may ask ourselves, was Lawrence a favourite artist from the days when as a little boy he made crayon drawings of visitors to his father’s inn, down to the time when he was sent on a tour of the chief European capitals to paint Kings, Kaiser, and Pope? Why, while artists remained critical and were even grudging in the measure of justice they meted out to him did all the wealthy patrons of art prefer his studio to that of his contemporaries, face the heavy and constantly increasing charges without protest, and rejoice in the possession of the canvas that his brush had covered? ”

“ In after years the East India Company erected a monument to Lawrence in Westminster Abbey, surmounted by his bust by Taylor, and inscribed: 'For Discipline established, Fortresses protected, Settlements extended, French and Indian armies defeated, and Peace restored in the Carnatic.' Monuments exist at Madras and Calcutta. A portrait of Lawrence by Sir Joshua Reynolds is in the India office.
Sir John Malcolm says (Life of Clive, ii. 66) that Lawrence neither was nor pretended to be a statesman, but was an excellent officer. ”

“ When Lawrence reached New York he became famous for his victory, and received at once promotion. The “Hornet,” given to Captain Biddle, was attached to Decatur’s squadron and blockaded at New London, while Lawrence received command of the “Chesapeake.” Lawrence was then thirty-two years old; he was born in New Jersey in 1781, entered the navy in 1798, and served in the war with Tripoli. He was first lieutenant on the “Constitution,” and passed to the grade of commander in 1810, commanding successively the “Vixen,” the “Wasp,” the “Argus,” and the “Hornet.” ”

“ She could take or reject. If she rejected him, something would die in him. For him it was life or death. And yet, all must be kept so dark, the consciousness must admit nothing.
“How long,” she said, “are you staying in England?”
“I am not sure—but not later than July, I believe.”
Then they were both silent. He was here, in England, for six months. They had a space of six months between them. He waited. The same iron rigidity, as if the world were made of steel, possessed her again. It was no use turning with flesh and blood to this arrangement of forged metal. ”

“ He looked round, and saw the white stocking lying on a chair.
“Is this another?” he said.
“No, that’s a sample,” she said. “There’s only a comic.” And she fetched in the long cartoon.
He stretched it out and looked at it solemnly.
“Fools!” he said, and went out of the room.
She flew upstairs and took off the ear-rings. When she returned, he was crouched before the fire blowing the coals. The skin of his face was flushed, and slightly pitted, as if he had had small-pox. But his neck was white and smooth and goodly. She hung her arms round his neck as he crouched there, and clung to him. ”

“ She could have risen up and smitten her guests, and turned them furiously out of the house, but she had to sit there and smile. The gambler's fever was upon her, and there was dire necessity for some ready money on the morrow. She rose from the table with a sudden resolution. As she turned, she saw Lawrence looking critically round him.
"You don't play," she said. "What interest is there to you?"
"It is a fine study in human nature," Lawrence replied. "All the evil emotions are here nicely chained up. I like to watch and study for myself. Let me sit down and smoke a cigarette and study." ”

“ Of that school John Lawrence proved the most ardent and the most renowned. Intermitting his work at Delhi, he became land revenue settlement officer in the district of Etawah, and there began, by buying out or getting rid of the talukdars, to realize the ideal which he did much to create throughout the rest of his career—a country “thickly cultivated by a fat contented yeomanry, each man riding his own horse, sitting under his own fig-tree, and enjoying his rude family comforts.” ”

“ Wherever he goes and makes his presence felt he seems to leave behind, probably unconsciously and certainly unwillingly, a number of fictitious Lawrences, people who seek to get something of the man’s power by a mere imitation of what happen to be at the time his outward peculiarities. ”

“ As the bullet went through his heart, young Pangus sprung some feet in the air, and fell lifeless in the stream below.
"O, the ever wakeful Providence of our Heavenly Father," whispered Mrs. Lawrence.
"The beautiful swell of land, directly in front of us, and clothed with verdure to its summit, is Starkes-hill," said Mr. Lawrence; "that on our right, just back of the village, is Kearsarge mountain."
"And those beyond, piled one upon another, in seemingly endless succession—far—far as the eye can reach," cried Mrs. Lawrence, "are the celebrated white mountains of New-Hampshire. O, how sublime! ”

“ Again, in a hut in the Air Force a comrade once asked him, ‘Excuse me, Shaw, but what does “iconoclast” mean?’—he acted as a handy cross-word dictionary—and then Lawrence outlined a brief history of the religious politics in fifth-century Constantinople which first gave rise to the word. But this is merely a good-humoured joke on himself: he despises mere knowledge, though he accumulates it and stores it carefully from old habit. He despises it because it is imperfect, because he sees knowledge as the opposite of wisdom. He never bluffs ”

“ A little older than Henry Kingsley (he died in the same year) , much more popular for a time, and the exerter of an influence which has not ceased yet, and has been on the whole distinctly undervalued, was George Henry Lawrence, who was educated at Rugby and Balliol, was called to the Bar, but was generally known in his own time as Major Lawrence from a militia commission which he held. ”

“ Lawrence from the harbor of Quebec. In politics he is a Conservative, but has never taken an active part in public affairs, though frequently pressed by his fellow-citizens to do so. He was, however, for many years a conspicuous member of the Quebec Board of Trade and its Council, and a director of the Quebec Bank. He was also a delegate to the first railroad convention held in Boston in 1851. In his younger days he held a commission as captain in the militia, and served under the late Colonel Boucher, of Maskinonge, P.Q. Throughout all the relations of life, Mr. ”

“ Long practice has made Lawrence able to talk for twenty minutes at a time to whoever accosts him without betraying that he hasn’t a notion who the person is. Yet he can remember names and details of taste and character, and words and opinions and places vividly and at great length. He does his best to see people; but is constantly getting into trouble for not recognizing and saluting officers when they are out of uniform; for nobody is willing to believe his excuses. ”

“ Lawrence, his eldest brother, had a captaincy in the colonial regiment which fought for England in the West Indies, in 1740, and the boy's whole mind was turned to war.
His father died when he was eleven years old, and George was sent to live with his married brother Augustine. Here he attended school, was eager in the acquirement of knowledge, and became expert in all athletic exercises. He very nearly entered on a naval career, but at his mother's earnest entreaty renounced the project, and returning to school, studied land-surveying. ”

“ His greatest natural gift is being able to switch off the current of his personality whenever he wishes to be unnoticed in company. He can look heavy and stupid, even vulgar; and uses this power constantly in self-protection. When he first joined the Royal Air Force he was sent one day to nail down carpets under the direction of an Air-Marshal’s wife. She had known him well, but Lawrence to avoid general embarrassment did not wish to be recognized, and so she did not know him. As a matter of fact he is hardly ever recognized in uniform by people who used to know him. ”

“ Lawrence looked out into the awful gloom, felt the creeping cold through all his bones and the sharp, shooting pains in his limbs, and was content. Of a truth he was not a man to do his loving by halves when it was real.
But human nature is not infallible, and it is doubtful if he could have endured much longer by the time a vague sound over the mountain fell on his ear. ”