William Wilberforce

Lawrence painted William Wilberforce around 1828, near the end of both men's lives. Wilberforce, the great anti-slavery campaigner whose decades-long parliamentary campaign had achieved the abolition of the slave trade in 1807, was by this time retired from Parliament but continued to advocate for the complete abolition of slavery, which would be achieved in 1833, shortly after his death. Lawrence's portrait captures the elderly reformer's gentle, deeply moral personality. Now in the National Portrait Gallery, the painting documents one of the most consequential moral reformers in British history.

The aging sitter's delicate features are rendered with extraordinary tenderness. Lawrence uses a light touch throughout, building form through suggestion rather than emphatic modeling. The effect is almost spiritual — the face seems to glow from within, reflecting the sitter's celebrated inner radiance.