The Talented Mr Regency - Thomas Lawrence: Regency Power and Brilliance at the National Portrait Gallery

Sex Sells. Celebrity Sells. Scandal Sells. Scholarship? Not so much. The traditional way to sell a portrait show is with an emphasis on celebrity sitters, studio liaisons, and social climbing from the garret to the court.

Stick a buzzword in the exhibition title: Joshua Reynolds: The Creation of Celebrity (Tate, 2005.) Sprinkle the exhibition guide with words like ‘international,’ ‘glamorous’ and ‘fashionable’ (Gainsborough, Tate, 2003; Pompeo Batoni, National Gallery, 2008.) Use phrases like ‘master of spin,’ ‘manipulation of the media,’ ‘free publicity’ and ‘cult of celebrity’ (The Creation of Celebrity, endlessly.) Above all, don’t forget this ticket-selling phrase: ‘the Mario Testino of his day’ (all portrait exhibitions post-Mario Testino: Portraits, National Portrait Gallery, 2001.)

There’s something troubling about this insistence that portraiture must be sexed-up, made contemporary, made palatable to an audience raised on Heat, celebrity wedding spreads, and the red carpet photo call. Everything must be filtered through modern obsessions; the preoccupations and social conventions of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries are dismissed as dusty, ‘unrelatable,’ and drily historic.

In Thomas Lawrence: Regency Power and Brilliance the National Portrait Gallery has admirably bucked the trend. The temptations must have been great. Lawrence was a social lion hunter. His back catalogue includes George III and Queen Charlotte, the Prince of Wales and the Duchess of Devonshire, the Duke of Wellington and the CEO of Lloyds, heroes of the West End stage and the Palace of Westminster, a couple of Prime Ministers and a Pope. This one had ‘Mario Testino’ written all over it.

Lawrence doesn’t need sexing-up or gossip-column titillation. What the dignified NPG show demonstrates is that an enviable address book and an It-boy persona only take you so far. What really matters is: can you paint? And, boy, can Lawrence paint.

He doesn’t just make his sitters look rich, he makes them look expensive. He endows them with the clotted cream and cherry-cheeked complexions of the truly well-bred. Tans and care-worn foreheads are for farm labourers, Lawrence’s sitters have the dewy skin and clear, bright eyes of people who breathe a superior sort of air: the air of thousand acre estates and Portman and St. James’s Squares.

Lawrence shows us the long haired Etonian Arthur Atherley brooding over Windsor with his romantic locks blow-dried into tumbling Vidal Sassoon waves. His Lady Selina Meade wears four strands of pearls around her pale, powdered neck, threaded on gold cord, each pearl reflecting a fleck of light. Mrs Wolff poses in yard after yard of pristine ivory satin, extravagantly ruched and puffed in the latest Empire style. It takes a lot of servants to keep a dress that white.   

Lawrence paints like a Marks and Spencers’ advert: this is not just a trouser suit, this is a Thomas Lawrence crimson velvet trouser suit edged with crushed French silk. This is not just a soldier’s uniform, this is a gold-frogged, silver-embroidered, bronze-sashed, ermine-trimmed officer’s uniform topped with a brushed-fur Busby hat.

Criticism tends to fall on Lawrence’s portraits of children: too cloying, a bit cutie-pie and sweetie-goo. No one does a chubby knee or a tousle-haired moppet like Lawrence does. The NPG have been rightly sparing with Lawrence’s treacle-pudding children. Four canvases of plump nursery cherubs are enough.

If there is a connection to be drawn between Lawrence and Testino it is this: they are both superlative flatterers. Lawrence paints with built-in Photoshop, slimming the thunder thighs and barrel chest of Lord Mountstuart and airbrushing the naked shoulders and décolletage of the Duchesse de Berry. In Lawrence’s hands his subjects are sexier, better, taller, stronger. Or even just cuter.