Sir Thomas Lawrence RA 1769–1830
NG 4257 
Queen Charlotte

Judy Egerton, 2000

Extracted from:
Judy Egerton, The British Paintings (London: National Gallery Company and Yale University Press, 2000).

1789

Oil on canvas, 239.5 × 147cm (94¼ × 58 in.)

Provenance

Not commissioned, and did not enter the Royal Collection; remained on Lawrence’s hands; in his studio sale, Christie’s 18 June 1831 (133), bt Sir Matthew White Ridley, 3rd Bt, MP (d.1836); by descent through his eldest son (cr. 1st Viscount Ridley) to 2nd Viscount Ridley (d. 1916); offered by the Trustees of the late Viscount Ridley at Christie’s, 8 July 1927 (59), bt in; purchased two weeks later through Christie’s from the Trustees of the 2nd Viscount Ridley out of the Temple‐West, Florence and Lewis Funds by the National Gallery 1927.

Exhibited

RA 1790 (100); BI 1833 (40, in Lawrence section); London, Grosvenor Gallery, Second National Loan Exhibition: Woman and Child in Art, 1913–14 (119) ; Paris, Louvre 1938 (79); NG , A Royal Subject: Portraits of Queen Charlotte, 1977 (exhibits unnumbered); NPG , Sir Thomas Lawrence, 1979–80 (3); Tate Gallery 1992–3 (50, repr. in colour).

At the Tate Gallery 1963–4.

Literature

Mrs [Charlotte] Papendiek, Court and Private Life in the time of Queen Charlotte: being the Journals of Mrs Papendiek, Assistant Keeper of the Wardrobe and Reader to Her Majesty, 2 vols, ed. Mrs Vernon Delves‐Broughton, London 1887, vol. II, pp. 133–4, 141–3; Davies 1946, pp. 95–6; Davies 1959, pp. 74–5; Millar 1969, p. xxii, fig. X; Michael Levey, A Royal Subject: Portraits of Queen Charlotte, exh. booklet, NG , London 1977, passim , with details plates 13(a), 13(b), infra‐red; 13(c), X‐ray; Ribeiro 1983, p. 122, no. 135; Garlick 1989, p. 168, repr. plate 4 in colour.

Technical Notes

Cleaned in 1960. In good condition apart from a tear in the distant landscape. The impasto has been crushed by lining. The X‐radiograph, reproduced here as fig. 1, shows some change in the outline of the hair. There are also alterations in the background above and to both sides of the head.

Discussion

Painted at the age of twenty. Oliver Millar 1969 describes this as ‘one of the most brilliant of all royal portraits, the only portrait of the Queen worthy to hang in company with Gainsborough’s’. Yet it failed to please either the Queen or the King, and remained on Lawrence’s hands.

Queen Charlotte (1744–1818), born and brought up in the small North German duchy of Mecklenburg‐Strelitz, had been selected as the most suitable bride for the newly succeeded George III by his mother’s agent, who toured ‘various little Protestant courts’ before awarding ‘the golden apple’ to the Princess Charlotte Sophia of Mecklenburg‐Strelitz. She arrived in England the day before her marriage to George III (8 September 1761) and was jointly crowned with him on 22 September 1761. Horace Walpole observed that she was ‘sensible and quick’ in understanding, had ‘great good nature’ and ‘much grace in her manner’; but neither he nor anyone else pretended that she had good looks. ‘She is not tall, nor a beauty; pale, and very thin, but looks sensible and is genteel. Her hair is darkish and fine, her forehead low, her nose very well, except the nostrils spreading too wide; her mouth has the same fault, but her teeth are good…’³ Four years later, the Earl of Chesterfield summed her up as ‘a good woman, a good wife, a tender mother, and an unmeddling Queen’.⁴ She had a passion for music,⁵ and an interest in botany. Her devotion to the King was absolute, despite many trials; and she bore him fifteen children, all but two surviving infancy.

By 1789 Queen Charlotte had already sat to Ramsay, Zoffany, Cotes, Angelica Kauffmann, West, Reynolds and Gainsborough.⁶ Their portraits, Lawrence’s and later portraits of the Queen are the subject of Michael Levey’s illuminating essay A Royal Subject, 1977.

An account of the circumstances in which Lawrence’s portrait was painted, compiled some forty years later, is given in the Journals of Charlotte Papendiek. Mrs Papendiek in 1789 was the young wife of one of the Queen’s German gentleman‐pages; she herself had a small place in the Queen’s household, in time becoming Assistant Keeper of the Wardrobe.⁷ She was only a few years older than Lawrence, and was evidently sympathetic to him.

Lawrence painted Queen Charlotte in Windsor Castle. The portrait was not positively commissioned. It seems that the initiative in suggesting that Lawrence should paint the Queen, and in securing permission for him to visit Windsor for this purpose, was taken by the American‐born Lady Cremorne, ‘a universal encourager of merit’,⁸ and then one of the Queen’s ladies‐in‐waiting. She was one of Lawrence’s first sitters; his stately portrait of Lady Cremorne⁹ (his first full‐length) had been exhibited in the spring of 1789 at the Royal Academy, where the Queen could have seen it. Some time in September 1789, Lawrence received a letter from Mr Compton, one of the Queen’s pages, desiring him to ‘come down to Windsor’ on 27 September and to ‘bring your painting apparatus with you’; the Queen would sit to him the following Monday. This letter (quoted in full below¹⁰), though undoubtedly encouraging, was not a formal commission; yet, as Levey notes, Lawrence had for some months believed that he would be given an opportunity to paint her,¹¹ and now seized this chance.

Lawrence arrived at Windsor, as instructed, on 27 September. There was no certainty that the Queen would sit to him. When Lady Cremorne brought Lawrence before the Queen the next day, she was reluctant to sit, saying (presumably to Lady Cremorne rather than to the unknown young man) ‘that she had not recovered sufficiently from all the trouble and anxiety she had gone through to give so young an artist a fair chance, more particularly as he saw her for the first time’.¹² That ‘trouble and anxiety’ refers of course to George III’s protracted mental illness over the last year; deep concern for him, and anxiety also over his crown and her own position combined to age her prematurely. A diary entry for 5 November 1788 by Fanny Burney, then Assistant Keeper of the Queen’s Wardrobe, paints a sad picture which should contribute to our understanding of Lawrence’s image of her, painted ten months later: ‘…pale, ghastly pale she looked; she was seated to be undressed, and attended by Lady Elizabeth Waldegrave and Miss Goldsworth; her whole frame was disordered, yet she was still and quiet… I gave her some camphor julep, which had been ordered her by Sir George Baker. “How cold I am” she said, and put her hand on mine; marble it felt! and went to my heart’s core!’¹³ Though the King’s recovery was publicly celebrated in a Thanksgiving Service in St Paul’s Cathedral on St George’s Day 1789, there could be no certainty that it was permanent. Mrs Papendiek observed after this that the Queen was ‘much changed; her hair quite grey, and her spirits sadly depressed’.¹⁴ Queen Charlotte may also, as Levey suggests, have been perturbed by political events in France.¹⁵ She was in no mood to sit for yet another portrait.

When she eventually agreed to sit to Lawrence, she did so with ill grace, her initial concern for ‘so young an artist’ rapidly evaporating. The sitting on 28 September is the only documented sitting, and was probably the only one she gave. It proceeded under difficulties. The Queen chose to sit in a dove‐coloured dress which, Mrs Papendiek noted, ‘with her sallowish complexion was most unbecoming’. Lawrence contrived to paint it as pale lavender; he gave a minutely sparkling edge to the gossamer‐like apron and converted the lace falling below the sleeves into exquisite cascades. The Queen had arrived to sit wearing a bonnet; since Lawrence objected to the bonnet and her proposed alternatives, a cap or a hat, she decided to sit to him bare‐headed.¹⁶ In this she knew exactly what she was doing. She was perfectly aware that she was a plain woman; she also knew that (as Mrs Papendiek records) her hair was ‘really beautiful’. Her favourite hairdresser Sonardi had evolved a style of dressing her hair in a manner [page 197]which was kind to her face; and she sat to Lawrence with her hair thus dressed, piled high over a false hair‐piece which Mrs Papendiek calls a ‘toupet’ (and the English a rat),¹⁷ adorned with tiny black bows. This, as she knew well (and Levey’s illustrations of more frumpish portraits of her in bonnets and caps prove her right), was becoming to her; and although Lawrence’s portrait of her bare‐headed reputedly ‘disgusted’ George III,¹⁸ her ‘Sonardi’ style as later displayed in Lawrence’s studio set something of a fashion, at least among Lawrence’s sitters.¹⁹

As the sitting wore on, the Queen became increasingly dour, her spirits not lifted by the fact that one of her daughters read to her. Lawrence suggested that she should ‘converse now and then with the Princesses, to give animation to the countenance’; the Queen considered the suggestion ‘rather presuming’.²⁰ Perhaps someone should have thought of sending for one of the musicians usually in attendance at Windsor; but she may have been too careworn even for the solace of music. Levey demonstrates, with infra‐red and X‐ray photographs of the head (the latter reproduced here, fig. 1), that Lawrence had to use all his skill to animate the Queen’s unyielding features (fig. 2). The interruption of the sitting by Benjamin West, Historical Painter to George III since 1772, did not help matters; Mrs Papendiek sensed that West ‘did not care to encourage too many of his own art about the King’.²¹ West’s suggestion that ‘a light scarf’ should be thrown over the Queen’s shoulders to break the plainness of her gown seems, however, to have been adopted.

Eventually the Queen refused to give Lawrence any further sittings, on the pretext that only Sonardi could dress her hair, that he was away and that it would be ‘troublesome’ to send for him.²² Lawrence ‘implored’ the Queen for one more brief sitting so that he might paint the ornaments she had worn: ‘by just putting on the ornaments as her Majesty wished to have them for a few minutes, he could sketch in their outline and finish them afterwards’. These ‘ornaments’ included several items from the casket of jewels which the King had given her as a wedding present in 1761, and which had assumed a deep symbolic importance to her. Pre‐eminent among them were a pair of six‐stranded pearl bracelets (each pearl ‘as large as a full pea’); each bracelet fastened with a large, diamond‐studded asymmetrical clasp, one clasp inset with a miniature portrait of the King by Jeremiah Meyer (in profile, facing left and wearing a crimson coat), the other with his monogram GR outlined in diamonds on strands of his hair. She wears the bracelets (Levey perceives that there is ‘an aspect of manacles’ about them, ‘for all that they are made of diamond and pearl’ ²³) in other portraits, sometimes with only the strands of pearls visible, occasionally with one or both clasps showing. Zoffany’s Queen Charlotte of 1771 shows the miniature on her right bracelet clearly;²⁴ but only in Lawrence’s portrait do the bracelets play such a significant role, as if the Queen were resolutely displaying the King’s portrait over her right wrist (fig. 3) and his royal cipher over her left to demonstrate her unwavering loyalty amid his trials. The gold and diamond ring worn on the little finger of [page 198]her left hand in Lawrence’s portrait is likely to be the ring inset with a smaller version of Jeremiah Meyer’s miniature of the King, also his present to her, which the Queen wore on her wedding day.²⁵ The brooch holding her muslin scarf has not been identified.

Lawrence had not failed during the Queen’s sitting to sense the importance she attached to the bracelets. Although his request for one more sitting so that he could paint the ornaments ‘as she wished to have them’ was refused, the Queen nevertheless made what must, for her, have been the huge concession of allowing Mrs Papendiek to put on the bracelets and the brooch holding the scarf as a ‘model’ for Lawrence.²⁶ In the finished picture, and from a close viewpoint, the ‘ornaments’ display the intricate craftsmanship of the clasps and ring as well as the brilliant sparkle suggested by minute touches of impasto. But looking at the picture as a whole, one can see that the bracelets have more than an ornamental role to play in Lawrence’s composition. The tiny black bows in the Queen’s piled‐up hair lead the eye downwards on a pyramidal course, through the black scarf over the shoulders to the darkly sparkling clasps of the bracelets on the Queen’s widely spread wrists, and finally to a pattern of dark lozenges on the carpet. Thus elegance is lent to but not forced upon the Queen’s dumpy figure.

All chances of finishing the portrait from life were then over. Lawrence was permitted to remain at Windsor (with board and lodging) until the New Year, ‘working up the picture and finishing it off’.²⁷ There was the background to paint. In Levey’s phrase, Lawrence turned the Queen’s plain chair ‘into a symbolic throne, suggesting a baldacchino by the sweep of heavily tasselled curtain, and associating her with the tradition of royal, pious benefaction by the distant glimpse of “holy Henry’s” Eton College chapel amid the autumnal trees’.²⁸ At some point during his stay at Windsor, he painted a small (23¼ × 17¼ in.) portrait of the youngest of the royal family, the six‐year‐old Princess Amelia, for which he received fifteen guineas.²⁹ He also made a chalk study of Mrs Papendiek and her young son.³⁰ Otherwise he whiled away his time playing whist in the pages’ room, and attending the Papendieks’ musical evenings.³¹

The Queen’s portrait was finished, presumably by the New Year; but neither the Queen nor the King admired it. Lawrence received no payment: Mrs Papendiek states clearly that ‘No money was paid’.³² The King told Lawrence to remove the portrait to London and have it engraved: ‘when that was done, the portrait was to be sent to Hanover, and then the King proposed to pay.’³³ The royal decision to despatch the portrait to the King’s relatives abroad instead of keeping it for the royal collection at home anticipates, as Lawrence later learnt, that ‘the Queen had considered her portrait a failure’.³⁴ Lawrence’s shortage of money saved the portrait from export: since he could not afford to carry out the careless royal injunction to have the portrait engraved, it remained in his studio.

The chagrin Lawrence no doubt felt at Windsor in 1789 was to some extent mitigated by the acclaim given to the portrait when he exhibited it at the Royal Academy the following year. Lawrence sent eleven pictures to the exhibition of 1790 (only the second year in which he had exhibited), including his portraits of the Queen and the Princess Amelia.³⁵ His eleven exhibits together made his name, reviewers dubbing him ‘the future Sir Joshua’.³⁶ Reynolds himself, realising the difference between his own Mrs Billington as Cecilia (no. 181 in the exhibition) and Lawrence’s work, is said to have remarked to Lawrence: ‘In you, sir, the world will expect to see accomplished all that I have failed to achieve.’³⁷ The chief sensation in the exhibition was undoubtedly Lawrence’s Portrait of an Actress (Elizabeth Farren, infinitely seductive in fur‐trimmed white satin):³⁸ ‘completely Miss Farren: arch, careless, spirited, elegant and engaging.’ But the Queen was not far behind – perhaps fourth, by The World’s rating: it considered that ‘the best portraits in the Room’ are ‘Sir Joshua’s Lady & Dog, Lawrence’s Head of Mr Locke, Miss Farren, and the Queen’;³⁹ the latter portrait, it declared, was ‘a performance of which VANDYKE would have been proud’.⁴⁰ Several reviewers commented on the ‘strong resemblance’⁴¹ or ‘most perfect likeness’.⁴² The English Chronicle and Universal Morning Post declared that ‘The QUEEN, by this young artist, is an admirable portrait, and, independent of the strong likeness, has a multitude of beauties. Even the background has a powerful effect. Criticism could scarcely point out a fault in this picture: true, her Majesty’s nose, indeed, appears sore from taking snuff; but that is not the fault of the painter.’⁴³

The King and Queen paid at least two visits to the exhibition at the Royal Academy. The King suggested to [page 199]Reynolds that Lawrence should be elected ARA ; but this was interpreted by the academicians as royal interference, and they did not elect Lawrence until the following year.⁴⁴ On Reynolds’s death in 1792, Lawrence was appointed Principal Painter to the King. He portrayed the King twice,⁴⁵ and dutifully made copies of Reynolds’s portraits of Their Majesties for official distribution;⁴⁶ but the Queen did not sit to him again, nor was there ever any hint that either the King or the Queen wished to recall the portrait of 1789 which they had rejected.

That portrait remained in Lawrence’s studio during his lifetime. After his death in 1831, it took its turn (lot 133) at Christie’s in his studio sale, which also included (as part of lot 130) a study for the head of the Queen (untraced: perhaps, Garlick suggests, the ‘tasteful sketch’ of the Queen with a scarf thrown over her shoulders mentioned by Mrs Papendiek).

For Lawrence NG 6370 and NG 129, see pp. 358–69 (a, b) .

Notes