Portrait of Frederick H. Hemming

Frederick H. Hemming sat for Lawrence in 1824, the same year Lawrence also painted his wife Mary Anne Bloxam, and the Kimbell Art Museum's possession of both pendant portraits gives these works a particular documentary completeness — husband and wife as Lawrence saw them together, preserved together in a Texas collection through the transatlantic dispersal of British portraiture that accelerated across the twentieth century. Lawrence occupied the presidency of the Royal Academy from 1820 until his death, and his portraits of prosperous London professional families like the Hemmings represent the solid middle layer of his practice that ran alongside the more celebrated royal and aristocratic commissions. As a fashionable portraitist in the 1820s, Lawrence balanced his grand diplomatic commissions — the Waterloo Chamber, the Papal portraits — with a substantial domestic practice serving the commercial and professional elite whose prosperity underpinned the Georgian economy. The Kimbell pairing survives as an unusually intact example of the companion portrait tradition that Georgian society expected as the appropriate form of marital documentation.

The portrait demonstrates Lawrence's gift for investing even relatively modest sitters with an air of natural distinction. Warm ochres and umbers dominate the palette, with the face emerging from shadow into light through carefully controlled tonal gradations.