Mrs Charles Thellusson, née Sabine Robarts (1775–1814), and Her Son, Charles Thellusson (1797–1856)

Mrs Charles Thellusson and her son, painted by Lawrence around 1804 and at Brodsworth Hall in Yorkshire, is a maternal double portrait that places the Swiss-origin banking family within the tradition of aristocratic maternal portraiture that Reynolds had established and that Lawrence continued to develop with greater Romantic warmth. The Thellusson family had come to England from Geneva in the early eighteenth century and built an extraordinary banking fortune; Peter Thellusson's famous will of 1796, leaving his estate to accumulate for several generations, had so alarmed the British establishment that Parliament passed the Thellusson Act of 1800 specifically to prevent similar trusts. Charles Thellusson continued the family banking interests while pursuing the social integration that his wealth made possible. Lawrence's tender treatment of Sabine Robarts Thellusson with her young son deploys the compositional intimacy of Romantic maternal portraiture — the mother's protective enclosure of the child, the child's natural engagement with the world — that was simultaneously a formal tradition and a genuine emotional observation. Brodsworth Hall, now preserved by English Heritage as an unusually intact Victorian country house, holds this early-nineteenth-century portrait as evidence of the Thellusson family's collecting taste before the Victorian renovation.

Lawrence excels in this dual portrait, balancing the tender relationship between mother and child with the formal requirements of a portrait commission. The warm palette and soft handling of the child's features contrast with the more polished treatment of the mother, creating a convincing sense of intimacy and affection.