LADY BLESSINGTON. FROM A PAINTING BY SIR THOMAS LAWRENCE.
This portrait of the gifted and brilliant woman who, as Lady Blessington, and the intimate friend of Count d'Orsay, alternately shocked and ruled the literary London of Byron's time, is representative of Lawrence's extreme mannerism; but, despite its "keepsake" prettiness, has great charm. Besides her distinguished beauty, Lady Blessington offered much, in her life and surroundings, to inspire a painter. Born in Ireland in 1789, she was forced at fourteen into marrying one Captain Farmer. She could not live with him, and they separated after three months. Farmer was killed in 1817, and the next year she married the Earl of Blessington. Then began that brilliant social career by virtue of which her fame now most survives. Her house became the resort of the most distinguished people of the time; and she herself, by her remarkable grace, cleverness, and vivacity, ever kept pace with the best of her company. She derived a large estate from her husband at his death, in 1829; and besides, for nearly twenty years she had ten thousand dollars a year from her novels (for she was also an author); but she lived most profusely, and had finally, in company with Count d'Orsay, to flee from her creditors. She died in Paris, June 4, 1849.
Lawrence, born at Bristol, May 4, 1769, was the son of the landlord of the Black Bear Inn at Devizes; and the child was not yet in his teens when some chalk drawings of his father's customers gave him a local reputation. We are told that "at the age of ten he set up as a portrait painter in crayons at Oxford; and soon after took a house at Bath, the then fashionable watering-place, where he immediately met with much employment and extraordinary success." When seventeen, his success called him to London, where in 1791, though under the age required by the laws of the Academy, he was elected as associate when twenty-two. The year before, he had painted the portraits of the king and queen; in 1794 he was made Academician, in 1815 was knighted, in 1820 was unanimously elected President of the Royal Academy, and in 1825 was created chevalier of the Legion of Honor in France.
This list of official honors is but little in comparison with the success which he had socially. Of a charming personality, he was admitted to the intimacy of all that Europe boasted of aristocracy and royalty. In 1815 he went to the congress at Aix-la-Chapelle, where his facile brush portrayed the august features of the allied sovereigns assembled there. He contributed, from 1787 to 1830 inclusive, three hundred and eleven pictures to the exhibitions of the Royal Academy.
It goes without saying that production of this quantity cannot be in every instance of the first quality. But the average merit of Lawrence's work is nevertheless of a high order. Of feminine charm (like many of his time and many of his predecessors) he was a master; no one has ever succeeded better in giving a certain aristocratic bearing to his sitters than he. It can be accounted a fault that this becomes somewhat stereotyped—that we feel that, were it wanting in the person before him, the amiable Sir Thomas could easily supply it. The English race has not changed so much in the short period which has elapsed since his time that the demeasurably large and liquid eyes, the swan-like necks, and the sloping shoulders, which mark it as his own in Lawrence's work, should be to-day of more rare occurrence. With this great and important limitation, among the pictures of Lawrence can be found a certain number of canvases, not always the most typical, of exceeding merit. Few men have ever conveyed better the impression of the depth and living quality of an eye, nor have many painters succeeded in giving to every part of their canvas the same qualities of color and brilliancy of execution as he.
