Lydia Elizabeth Hoare, Lady Acland (1786-1856) with her Two Sons Thomas later 11th Bt (1809-1898) and Arthur (1811-1857)

Lydia Elizabeth Hoare, who married Sir Thomas Dyke Acland, 10th Baronet, came from the Hoare banking dynasty — the founders of Hoare's Bank, Britain's oldest surviving private bank, whose Counter Street premises had served the gentry and aristocracy since the seventeenth century. Lawrence's 1814 portrait of Lady Acland with her sons Thomas and Arthur, now in a National Trust property, brings the conventions of the Regency maternal portrait to a sitter whose social position combined the land-based authority of the Aclands with the financial power of the Hoares. The large format (152.4 by 116.8 centimetres) allows Lawrence to develop a compositional complexity appropriate to a three-figure group: the mother's central stability provides the structural anchor from which the two boys animate the composition with the natural liveliness that Lawrence's child portraiture consistently celebrated. Lawrence excelled at making such groups feel observed rather than arranged — the slight informality that distinguished his portraits from the more rigidly hierarchical approach of his predecessors.

This work demonstrates Thomas Lawrence's command of Romantic-period painting techniques.