Charlotte Dee, Mrs Charles Edmund Nugent (1756-1813), as Mrs Johnstone

Painted in 1789, when Lawrence was twenty years old and already astonishing the London art world with his precocious gifts, this portrait of Charlotte Dee in the character of 'Mrs. Johnstone' belongs to the flourishing tradition of fancy-dress and theatrical portraiture that had been popularized by Reynolds's Grand Style. The theatrical portrait — where the sitter appeared in assumed character rather than in their own person — allowed artists to transcend the documentary constraints of conventional portraiture and move toward something more imaginative and literary. Lawrence in 1789 was working at Bristol and London simultaneously, attracting notice that would culminate in his Academy debut the following year. The confidence of this work — the costume handled with rapid, shimmering strokes, the expression caught mid-performance — is remarkable in so young a painter and already anticipates the bravura that would define his mature career. Lawrence's early female portraits from this period show the particular energy of a young artist who has found his natural idiom and is exploiting it with the uninhibited pleasure of discovery.

The fancy-dress conceit allows the young Lawrence to experiment with color and costume beyond normal portrait conventions. The result is a more playful composition than his later formal portraits, with brighter hues and a more animated pose that reveals his early facility with paint.