Lady Caroline Lamb (d.1828)

Lady Caroline Lamb, painted by Lawrence around 1827 and at Bristol City Museum, presents the famous Byron obsessive in the final years of her life — her health failing, her marriage effectively over, her literary career winding down. Caroline's ten-week pursuit of Byron in 1812 — the obsessive letters, the disguises, the scenes — had become the defining scandal of the Regency era and permanently damaged her social standing even as it generated the most notorious encounter in Romantic literary history. Her novel Glenarvon (1816), a thinly veiled account of her affair with Byron disguised as Gothic fiction, had provided a degree of literary revenge while completing her social ruin. By 1827 she was estranged from her husband William Lamb (the future Prime Minister Melbourne), her health devastated by the combination of genuine emotional disorder and the social isolation that followed her scandalous decade. Lawrence's portrait captures her at fifty-five — just a year before her death — with the directness of observation that he consistently brought to his most historically interesting female subjects. Bristol City Museum's collection preserves this portrait of one of the Regency era's most vivid and tragic personalities.

Lawrence paints Lady Caroline with a sensitivity that acknowledges her faded beauty and the ravages of a difficult life. The brushwork is gentle rather than brilliant, the overall impression one of melancholy refinement that captures the complex personality of a woman who had been both celebrated and pitied by society.