Henry Phipps, 1st Earl of Mulgrave

Painted around 1790, when Lawrence was just twenty-one years old, this portrait of Henry Phipps dates from one of the most remarkable debuts in the history of British portraiture. Phipps, who would go on to serve as Foreign Secretary from 1804 to 1805 and First Lord of the Admiralty, was in 1790 a soldier beginning his rise through the networks of Georgian political and military life. Lawrence at this stage was already causing a sensation — his full-length of Queen Charlotte at the Royal Academy exhibition of 1790 had announced a dazzling new talent to the London art world. The young Lawrence's technique was already audacious: dark coats captured in rapid, sketch-like strokes against dramatically worked backgrounds, faces built up in transparent glazes that suggested skin from within rather than applying it to a surface. Gainsborough had died in 1788, leaving Reynolds as the dominant figure, but Lawrence was already being spoken of as his natural successor. That this portrait now resides in the Bavarian State Painting Collections reflects the international dispersal of British portrait painting through diplomatic gifts and nineteenth-century collecting on the Continent.

This early portrait shows Lawrence developing the bold, dramatic approach that would become his trademark. The lighting is more conventional than in his later works, but the confident brushwork and attention to the sitter's alert expression already signal an artist of exceptional promise.