George Tennyson (1749/1750–1835), Grandfather of Alfred Tennyson

George Tennyson, grandfather of Alfred Lord Tennyson, painted by Lawrence around 1800 and now at the Usher Gallery in Lincoln, was a prosperous Lincolnshire solicitor and landowner whose family would produce one of Victorian England's greatest poets within two generations. George Tennyson held estates at Bayons Manor in Lincolnshire and exercised the social authority of the provincial gentry professional class — educated, prosperous, politically engaged within his county, and sufficiently ambitious to commission a portrait from the leading London portraitist. His son George Clayton Tennyson, the poet's father, was a troubled clergyman whose mental health difficulties and family conflicts created the difficult domestic atmosphere from which Alfred Tennyson escaped into poetry. The Usher Gallery in Lincoln preserves this portrait in the regional context most directly connected to the Tennyson family's Lincolnshire world, maintaining the geographic specificity that gives Georgian provincial portraiture much of its historical resonance. Lawrence's treatment of George Tennyson — solid, respectable, provincial — captures the bourgeois gentry world that would nourish English Romanticism's most significant later voice without either sitter or painter imagining that the commission had any special historical significance.

Lawrence's handling captures the sitter's strong-willed character through direct, confident modeling of the face, with particular attention to the firm set of the jaw and steady gaze. The palette is warm but restrained, appropriate to a provincial landowner rather than a London society figure.