Philadelphia Hannah, 1st Viscountess Cremorne

Philadelphia Hannah, 1st Viscountess Cremorne, was painted by Lawrence around 1789, when he was barely twenty — yet the work projects a confidence and command that would have surprised an observer who did not know the painter's age. The Viscountess was an Irish noblewoman, and her commission represents Lawrence's early penetration of the Anglo-Irish gentry, a client base that would grow substantially as his reputation spread beyond his initial Bristol and London circles. The monumental scale of this work — at 148 × 240 cm an ambitious full-length — represents an extraordinary undertaking for so young a painter, suggesting either that the Viscountess had seen enough of Lawrence's work to trust him with a grand commission, or that Lawrence himself proposed the scale to demonstrate his ambitions. Now in Tate, the portrait represents the very beginning of Lawrence's four-decade domination of British portraiture: the technique already shows the warm tonality and fluid drapery handling that would become his hallmarks, though the freshness of this early work has a directness that his more practiced later portraits sometimes temper.

Even at twenty, Lawrence demonstrates a gift for rendering female beauty that goes beyond mere flattery. The viscountess's features are modeled with a delicacy that suggests both physical attractiveness and personal vivacity, while the costume is handled with already-characteristic bravura.