Of Lawrence’s merit as a painter an unduly favorable estimate was taken during his life, and since his death his reputation has suffered an undue depreciation.  Much that he did partook of the false and bad style which, from the deeper source of degraded morality, spread a taint over all matters of art and taste, under the vicious influence of the “first gentleman of Europe,” whose own artistic preferences bore witness, quite as much as the more serious events of his life, how little he deserved the name.  Hideous Chinese pagoda pavilions, with grotesque and monstrous decorations, barbarous alike in form and in color; mean and ugly low-roomed royal palaces, without either magnificence or simplicity; military costumes, in which gold and silver lace were plastered together on the same uniform, testified to the perverted perception of beauty and fitness which presided in the court of George the Fourth.  Lawrence’s own portrait of him, with his corpulent body girthed in his stays and creaseless coat, and his heavy falling cheek supported by his stiff stock, with his dancing-master’s leg and his frizzled barber’s-block head, comes as near a caricature as a flattered likeness of the original (which was a caricature) dares to do.  To have had to paint that was enough to have vulgarized any pencil.  The defect of many of Lawrence’s female portraits was a sort of artificial, sentimental elegantism.  Pictures of the fine ladies of that day they undoubtedly were; pictures of great ladies, never; and, in looking at them, one sighed for the exquisite simple grace and unaffected dignity of Reynolds’s and Gainsborough’s noble and gentle women.

The lovely head of Lady Nugent, the fine portrait I have mentioned of Mrs. W——­, the splendid one of Lady Hatherton, and the noble picture of my grandmother, are among the best productions of Lawrence’s pencil; and several of his men’s portraits are in a robust and simple style of art worthy of the highest admiration.  His likeness of Canning (which, by the bye, might have passed for his own, so great was his resemblance to the brilliant statesman) and the fine portrait he painted for Lord Aberdeen, of my uncle John, are excellent specimens of his best work.  He had a remarkable gift of producing likenesses at once striking and favorable, and of always seizing the finest expression of which a face was capable; and none could ever complain that Lawrence had not done justice to the very best look they ever wore.  Lawrence’s want of conscience with regard to the pictures which he undertook and never finished, is difficult to account for by any plausible explanation.  The fact is notorious, that in various instances, after receiving the price of a portrait, and beginning it, he procrastinated, and delayed, and postponed the completion, until, in more than one case, the blooming beauty sketched upon his canvas had grown faded and wrinkled before the image of her youthful loveliness had been completed.