Self-portrait

Lawrence's 1787 self-portrait at the Denver Art Museum was painted when he was eighteen years old and had already been supporting his family with his artistic earnings for several years. Born in 1769, the son of a Devizes innkeeper, Lawrence had been drawing pastel portraits of guests from childhood, and by the early 1780s his talent was sufficiently advanced that his family had essentially lived off the income from his portraits. The self-portrait is a remarkable document of precocious self-awareness: the young man observing himself in a mirror and translating that observation into paint with an assurance that would have been extraordinary in a trained artist twice his age. He had arrived in London to study at the Royal Academy Schools in 1787, and the self-portrait documents the beginning of his metropolitan career with the confident self-presentation of someone who already knew his abilities. Reynolds, then in the last years of his life, recognized Lawrence's exceptional talent and reportedly told the young painter he needed only industry and the preservation of his genius to become a great painter. The Denver Art Museum's holding reflects the international distribution of Lawrence's works through the twentieth-century art market.

The youthful self-portrait already displays the confidence and fluency that would characterize Lawrence's mature work. The warm, direct handling of the face and the assured composition reveal an eighteen-year-old who understood his own powers and was determined to announce them to the world.