François, baron Gérard, painter (1770–1837)

When Lawrence sat François Gérard before him around 1824, he was engaged in something more than a society commission: two national portrait painters — the undisputed champions of their respective countries' visual cultures — were exchanging professional acknowledgment across the channel that had made them contemporaries but rivals. Gérard had risen under Napoleon as the official portraitist of the imperial family, painting Joséphine, the marshals, and Bonaparte himself, before seamlessly transferring his allegiance to the Bourbons in 1814 and receiving from Louis XVIII the same ennoblement from which the portrait's title derives. Lawrence, who traversed Europe in 1818–19 assembling the Waterloo Chamber likenesses for George IV, had encountered the full extent of post-Napoleonic patronage culture — the diplomatic use of portraits as gifts, the competition between capitals for the most fashionable brush — and his portrait of Gérard belongs to that world of inter-artistic diplomacy. The small format (70 by 58 centimetres) and the Museum of the History of France at Versailles as its destination both suggest this was a cabinet work intended as a personal souvenir rather than a state commission, its intimacy appropriate to a meeting between equals who respected each other across the political divide that had separated their patrons.

Lawrence employs his signature loose, sweeping brushstrokes in the clothing and background while reserving tighter, more deliberate modeling for the face. The warm tonality and fluid handling of drapery reflect the assured technique of Lawrence's final years.