Art Fund Grant For Unique Lawrence Drawing

Saturday, 13 August 2005 13:29

LONDON, ENGLAND.- The Art Fund has given a grant of £50,000 to the British Museum towards the acquisition of a magnificent drawing by Sir Thomas Lawrence (1769-1830). This important drawing of Mary Hamilton is arguably the most beautiful female portrait of its type remaining in this country. The total cost of the work was £165,000, with additional funding from the National Heritage Memorial Fund. The drawing was purchased by a dealer at auction in 2002 and was later sold to a buyer abroad but the export licence was deferred to allow funds to be raised to keep it in the UK. Museums and galleries in the UK are notoriously lacking in fine examples of Lawrence’s works; many of his best paintings and drawings are in private hands or in collections abroad. The framed drawing is in pencil and red and black chalk and is 458 x 312mm in size. Relatively few portrait drawings of this period have been identified with those known to have been exhibited at the Royal Academy. Portrait drawings were an extremely popular genre of art; they were indicators of taste, sentiment and social and material culture, yet this is an area which has been little-studied. This exquisite drawing could form one of the bases of such a study and its acquisition has provided the British Museum with an opportunity to place Lawrence at the centre of this fashionable genre. The vigour and freedom that characterised Lawrence’s early work are manifest in this charming drawing. Its location was unknown until its sale and it must be regarded as an important discovery of a work in an historically significant genre and medium by one of the country’s most significant artists. Delacroix described Lawrence’s portraiture as ‘incomparable’ and in his time, his portrait drawings were rivalled only by Ingres.

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