Lady William Gordon (1761–1841), née Frances Ingram

Lady William Gordon, née Frances Ingram, painted by Lawrence around 1800 and now at Temple Newsam near Leeds, represents the northern English aristocratic establishment whose Yorkshire connections to the Ingram family made Temple Newsam one of the region's most significant country houses. The Ingrams had owned Temple Newsam since the early seventeenth century, and the house's collection of paintings, furniture, and decorative arts accumulated over those centuries made it among the most important in the north of England. Frances Ingram married Lord William Gordon, a son of the Duke of Gordon, connecting the Yorkshire family to the Scottish aristocracy through a marriage that exemplified the geographic reach of the British aristocratic marriage market. Temple Newsam passed to the Leeds City Council in the twentieth century and is now a museum — one of the few large country houses in the north of England to remain substantially intact with much of its original collection. Lawrence's portrait of Lady Gordon, painted in the early years of her marriage when she was in her late thirties, belongs to the northern country house tradition of family documentation that preserved the visual record of the families who inhabited these great houses.

The portrait showcases Lawrence's gift for painting women of the aristocracy, with luminous skin tones and an elegant treatment of hair and dress. Fluid, sweeping brushstrokes in the costume create a sense of movement and life that distinguished Lawrence's female portraits from the more static convention of the period.