possession, whether pictures, drawings, engravings, casts, marbles, bronzes, or models, and books, plate, linen, china, and other effects, should be sold. The produce of such of Sir Thomas's collections of works of art as were sold by auction, was 15,4457. 17s. 6d.; and the Testator's estate was about equal to the demands upon it.

LAWRENCE'S HOUSE.

Haydon, on May 25, 1832, visited the house of Sir Thomas Lawrence, in Russell-square. He records, in his Journal: "Nothing could be more melancholy or desolate. I knocked and was shown in. The passages were dusty-the paper torn-the parlours dark-the painting-room, where so much beauty had once glittered, forlorn, and the whole appearance desolate and wretched-the very plate on the door green with mildew.

"I went into the parlour, which used to be instinct with life. Poor Sir Thomas !—always in trouble,' said the woman who had the care of the house. Always something to worrit him.' I saw his bedroom, small, only a little bed; the mark of it was against the wall. Close to his bedroom was an immense room, (where was carried on all his manufactory of draperies, &c.) divided, yet open over the partitions. It must have been five or six small rooms turned into one large workshop. Here his assistants worked. His painting-room was a large back drawing-room: his show-room a large front one. He occupied a parlour and a bedroom; all the rest of the house was turned to business. Any one would think that people of fashion would visit from remembrance the house where they had spent so many happy hours. Not they,--they shun a disagreeable sensation. They have no feeling, no poetry. It is shocking. It is dirty."

CHARACTERISTICS, RETROSPECTIVE OPINIONS, AND PERSONAL TRAITS.

LAWRENCE AND REYNOLDS COMPARED.

Sir Thomas Lawrence's likenesses were celebrated as the most successful of his time; yet no likenesses exalted so much, or refined more upon the originals. He wished to seize the expression, rather than copy the features. His attainment of likenesses was most laborious: one distinguished person, who favoured him with forty sittings for a head alone, declared he was the slowest painter he ever sat to, and he had sat to many.

Sir Joshua Reynolds seems to have created and idealized the individual person as well as the groups when under his pencil, showing a boldness and diversity of arrangement unexampled in the history of portraiture. Lawrence, compared to Reynolds, was confined and limited far more than his powers could have justified, admitting but small deviation in the placing of the heads-small variety of pictorial composition. The features were painted nearly in all his heads, in the same light and in the same position; but they derived from this a perfection of execution not to be surpassed. In the drawing and touching of the human eye, he gave a lustre and life which Rubens and Vandyck have equalled but not excelled. The question, however, will be how far this deviation from actual appearances may be allowed; for it will be said, can anything be a better representation of a man than the transcript of himself, or can it be a better likeness by being unlike to man ?*

Burnet has well compared the two painters. "The Reynolds' exhibition was richness itself, and glowing with deeptoned brightness, so much so, that the best portraits by Titian or Rembrandt might have been interposed on the walls without gaining the least ascendancy: the gallery during the Lawrence exhibition, on the contrary, looked cold, and many

* Life of Sir David Wilkie.

of the pictures chalky; even the surface, though pure white in the draperies, had become a slate-colour, from the absence of a rich vehicle to preserve the white lead from the action of the atmosphere."

HOWARD'S CHARACTER OF LAWRENCE.

Mr. Howard, the Secretary of the Royal Academy, has left this interesting sketch of Lawrence's talents :—

"In the first part of his career, he was inclined to carry his taste for the colouring of the old masters a little too far, and the pursuit of tone, chiaro-scuro, and breadth, led him into a style rather artificial, and approaching to manner; but he gradually got the better of this error, and, by incessant study and application, became at once artful and more natural. Indefatigable, and never satisfied with his productions, like Pope, he laboured hard to gain a reputation, and then laboured hard to maintain it. On one occasion, he is known to have painted thirty-eight hours together, without reposing or taking any sustenance but coffee. It is remarkable that in the latter part of his life, when his great practice might have been expected to make him more rapid in the completion of his work, the increased pains he took, arising no doubt from his improved perceptions, acquired for him the character of slowness,-for him who had painted that admirable picture of Hamlet in so short a time as one week!

"He was a finished draughtsman, had a perfect knowledge of the human figure in its various classes, an exquisite feeling of the beautiful, the grand, and the pathetic, with a rich and luxuriant taste in landscape and background-in short, seemed deficient in no one requisite. He possessed, too, an enthusiastic love for the higher qualities of the art, as was evinced by his admiration of Michael Angelo and Raphael, of Fuseli, Flaxman, and Stothard, which, in a country where there was any demand for historical painting, would have inevitably have led him to the first rank of excellence. The few examples he has left of his talents in this way help to prove it; if we ought not rather to say, that many of his portraits, such as his Kembles, Mrs. Siddons, young Lambton, &c. belong equally to this class of art.

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"His great technical excellence seems to have been drawing.

which is, undoubtedly, the true formation of painting. Reynolds is a remarkable and almost solitary instance of what chiaro-scuro and ingenuity may do to conceal the want of it; but it enabled Lawrence to make out his heads with a surprising minuteness and accuracy of detail, such as perhaps were never before combined with so much breadth and delicacy.

Proofs of these high qualities are to be found, more or less, in almost all his works, beginning with the lovely portrait of Miss Farren down to Lady Londonderry and the Duchess of Richmond. Those of His Majesty George the Fourth, the Pope, Cardinal Gonsalvi, the Emperor of Austria, Duke of Wellington, Duke of Bedford, Sir W. Grant, young Lambton, the children of Mr. Calmady, &c. are among the finest the art ever produced.

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His talents were by no means confined to painting. nobleman of acknowledged taste, (the late Marquis of Abercorn,) said of him, "He knows only one language, but that he knows better than any other man." When young, he displayed great taste in singing, and so much dramatic power, that Sheridan declared him to be the best amateur actor in the kingdom."*

LAWRENCE AND ETTY.

In early life, Etty tells us that he placed himself under Lawrence. Though he painted in the house of Sir Thomas, he received little or no instruction from him. 66 Still," says Leslie, "the contemplation and copying the works of that eminent man could not but in some degree affect his style; indeed, the Art of Lawrence had so much of fascination in it as to maintain a widely-spread influence over the rising talent of the day, and gradually to undermine till it almost entirely superseded the taste imparted by Reynolds and Gainsborough to higher portraiture.

* Of two plays acted at the seat of Lord Abercorn, in which Lawrence performed along with the Hamiltons and Lindsays, he used to give an account, Fuseli said, in the style of a stage manager. It will be enough to say, that he acted the part of Lord Rakeland, in "The Wedding Day," and of Grainger, in "Who's the Dupe?" before the Prince of Wales, the Duke of Devonshire, the Marquis of Abercorn, and Sheridan; was applauded; and imagined he gained rather than lost in the esteem of the great by this exhibition.

"If Etty acquired a tinge of something in the house of Lawrence which he might better have been without, it is greatly to his praise that he came from it a colourist destined to rank with the very best that have lived; for the school of the great portrait-painter was certainly not one of colour. But I believe his first impressions of harmony were derived more from Fuseli, who, even if his pictures did not prove his sensibility to the refinements of colour, had sufficiently shown it in his lectures, and in no sentence more than that in which he tells us he had always courted colour as a despairing lover courts a disdainful mistress,'- -a mistress much less disdainful than he imagined."-Leslie's Handbook, p. 305.

CAUSE OF LAWRENCE'S EMBARRASSMENT.

It is a remarkable fact, that Lawrence, whose popularity ought to have made him rich, was actually embarrassed in his circumstances throughout life. Was his money spent in profligate dissipation? No: it is quite clear, as far as a negative can be proved, that he was neither a gambler nor viciously extravagant. That a part of his pecuniary difficulties arose from his generosity as to his relatives must be inferred from his own statements, but not to the degree to be considered the principal, still less, the sole cause, of his embarrassed affairs. If he had been a twentieth part as circumspect in money management as in conversation, and half as cautious to avoid innocent extravagance, he would have been, in spite of his generosity to his family, a rich man. But he was utterly heedless of accounts: he kept his books so imperfectly, as to have omitted a debt of 500 guineas due to him from one of the noblest families in the kingdom; and it is probable that he omitted other sitters, who were not so punctilious as that family in volunteering the payment of the unclaimed debt to the executor. He was munificent in his kindness to his brother artists, and was prodigal to all who applied for his charity; and a vast deal more of his time than was commonly supposed, was spent in gratuitous drawings or paintings, of which he made presents to his friends.-Letter from Mr. T. Campbell; in the Preface to the Life of Lawrence.

Sir Thomas Lawrence, (says Leslie,) was, perhaps, hindered from rising to the highest rank as a colourist by his early and first practice of making portraits in colourless chalk only. His wish to please the sitter made him yield, more than his