Portrait of Lord Lynedoch

Lord Lynedoch — General Sir Thomas Graham — painted by Lawrence around 1817 at Apsley House, was one of the most remarkable figures of the entire Napoleonic period for the unusual circumstances that launched his military career. In 1792, aged forty-four and with no military background, Graham witnessed French Revolutionary soldiers impudently opening the coffin of his recently deceased wife Maria as it was being transported through France — an act of desecration that provoked in this cultivated Scottish country gentleman such outrage that he returned to Britain, raised a regiment at his own expense, and embarked on a military career that eventually brought him to Wellington's right hand. His victory at the Battle of Barrosa in 1811 — won against a numerically superior French force with minimal assistance from his Spanish allies — was one of the most tactically brilliant engagements of the entire Peninsular War. Apsley House, Wellington's London residence, holds this portrait in the collection assembled around the memory of the Napoleonic campaigns; Graham and Wellington's professional relationship made the Lynedoch portrait appropriate within the great general's collection. Lawrence treats the aged soldier with the heroic dignity appropriate to a man whose grief had been transmuted into military achievement.

Lawrence paints the elderly soldier with the weathered dignity of a man who came late to war but distinguished himself through sheer courage and determination. The face shows the marks of campaigning and age, rendered with honest warmth rather than the idealization Lawrence applied to younger, more fashionable sitters.