George Granville Leveson-Gower (1758–1833), 1st Duke of Sutherland

George Granville Leveson-Gower, 1st Duke of Sutherland, painted by Lawrence in 1800 and at Abbot Hall Art Gallery in Kendal, was at the time of this portrait one of the wealthiest men in England and the owner of vast estates in Scotland, including the Sutherland lands in the far north that would become notorious for the Highland Clearances. His wife, the Countess of Sutherland in her own right, inherited the Sutherland estates from her own family, and their joint management of those lands — clearing thousands of tenants from their traditional holdings to make way for sheep farming in the name of agricultural improvement — became one of the defining atrocities of Scottish history. Karl Marx cited the Sutherland Clearances as a key example of primitive accumulation in Capital. The 1800 portrait predates the most intense period of the Clearances but documents the man whose wealth and power made them possible. Abbot Hall Art Gallery in the Lake District holds this portrait at some geographic distance from the Scottish events most associated with its subject; the work's quality documents Lawrence's full technical authority at age thirty-one.

Lawrence portrays the future Duke with the assured elegance of immense wealth and social position. The warm, polished treatment reflects the sitter's place at the very apex of Georgian society, with careful attention to the aristocratic features and confident bearing that wealth and breeding together produced.