Portrait of Elizabeth Blake, Lady Wallscourt, playing a guitar

Elizabeth Blake, Lady Wallscourt, playing a guitar and painted by Lawrence around 1825, combines the genre of musical instrument portraiture with the standard female full-length in a way that creates informal animation within formal composition. The guitar as portrait accessory had become fashionable in the Romantic period as an emblem of domestic feminine accomplishment — distinguishable from the more formal piano or harp that implied professional musical ambition, the guitar suggested intimate social music-making appropriate to drawing room entertainment. Lawrence occasionally introduced such genre elements to relieve the potentially static quality of formal commissioned portraiture, and the result consistently produced works of greater warmth and animation than his purely conventional portraits. Lady Wallscourt's identity — a member of the Irish Burke family who held the Wallscourt barony — connects her to the Anglo-Irish world that provided Lawrence with a significant proportion of his female sitters. The portrait's current institutional location being unresolved suggests it passed through the auction market without entering a named museum collection, remaining in private hands or within a family collection not publicly catalogued.

Lawrence uses the guitar to create an engaging composition, the sitter's hands positioned on the instrument adding visual interest and suggesting cultured leisure. The warm palette and fluid treatment of the dress and hair demonstrate his late-career mastery, while the attentive focus on the music gives the face an expression of absorbed concentration.