[Illustration: PLATE VIII.--KING GEORGE IV.
This portrait, painted in the last years of the artist’s life, when he was President of the Royal Academy, is a notable study, despite its rather absurd proportions and artificial background. The figure is rather stiffly posed if carefully observed, the brushwork highly skilled. It was painted when Sir Thomas had returned from the Continent, after a careful and discriminating study of the Italian Masters.]
Lawrence looked upon his sitters with an eye that magnified all points of beauty or attraction and passed over the failings, the blemishes, the points that in more conscientious eyes might have made a portrait true rather than merely attractive. It was but necessary to have the beginnings of beauty, to have some attractive features, and Lawrence would go to them instinctively, they would be the foundation of his study, other points of less attraction would fade from the representation on canvas. It was his singular gift, not only to see beauty, but to pick out the aspects of the sitter that would give the most attractive result possible without absolutely rank flattery or deception.
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. The female heads do not suffer from this--perhaps they are the better for it--but the male ones do; in place of strength we find effeminacy, and many of his men sitters narrowly escaped the charge of being pretty. Allan Cunningham does not hesitate to express his conviction that Lawrence became weaker and more effeminate of set purpose because he found that by doing so he kept his dangerous rival Hoppner at bay. This marks the difference between Reynolds and Lawrence, for the first named was strengthened by the rivalry of Romney; at least Lawrence himself thought that some of Sir Joshua’s finest efforts were produced by Romney’s rivalry.