Sir Thomas Lawrence PRA FRS (13 April 1769 – 7 January 1830) was an English portrait painter and the fourth president of the Royal Academy.

In 1810, he acquired the generous patronage of the Prince Regent, was sent abroad to paint portraits of allied leaders for the Waterloo Chamber at Windsor Castle, and is particularly remembered as the Romantic portraitist of the Regency.

Lawrence's love affairs were not happy (his tortuous relationships with Sally and Maria Siddons were the subjects of several books) and, in spite of his success, he spent most of life deep in debt and never married.

Soon after Thomas was born, his father decided to become an innkeeper and took over the White Lion Inn and next-door American Coffee House in Broad Street, Bristol.

But the venture did not prosper, and in 1773 Lawrence senior removed his family from Bristol and took over the tenancy of the Black Bear Inn in Devizes,[note 1] a favourite stopping place for the London gentry making their annual trip to take the waters at Bath.

[2] It was during the family's six-year stay at the Black Bear Inn that Lawrence senior began to make use of his son's precocious talents for drawing and reciting poetry.

[5] By age ten his fame had spread sufficiently for him to receive a mention in Daines Barrington's Miscellanies as "without the most distant instruction from anyone, capable of copying historical pictures in a masterly style".

[8] Wealthy people allowed him to study their collections of paintings, and Lawrence's drawing of a copy of Raphael's Transfiguration was awarded a silver-gilt palette and a prize of 5 guineas by the Society of Arts in London.

Aged just 20, Lawrence received his first royal commission, a summons arriving from Windsor Palace to paint the portraits of Queen Charlotte and Princess Amelia.

[13] In 1791 Lawrence was elected an associate of the Royal Academy and the following year, on the death of Sir Joshua Reynolds, King George III appointed him "painter-in-ordinary to his majesty".

Biographers have never been able to discover the source of his debts; he was a prodigiously hard worker (once referring in a letter to his portrait painting as "mill-horse business")[16] and did not appear to live extravagantly.

Lawrence stayed at Montague House, the princess's residence in Blackheath, while he was painting the portraits and thus became implicated in the "delicate investigation" into Caroline's morals.

Charlotte died in childbirth; Lawrence completed the portrait and presented it to her husband Prince Leopold at Claremont on his birthday, as agreed.

[26] Eventually, in September 1818, Lawrence was able to make his postponed trip to the continent to paint the allied leaders, first at Aachen and then at the conference of Vienna, for what would become the Waterloo Chamber series, housed in Windsor Castle.

Fanny Kemble, a niece of Sarah Siddons, was one of his last sitters (for a drawing).Lawrence died suddenly on 7 January 1830, just months after his friend Isabella Wolff.

A few days previously he had experienced chest pains but had continued working and was eagerly anticipating a stay with his sister at Rugby, when he collapsed and died during a visit from his friends Elizabeth Croft and Archibald Keightley.

[34] Lawrence was famed for the length of time he took to finish some of his paintings (Isabella Wolff waited twelve years for her portrait to be completed) and, at his death, his studio contained a large number of unfinished works.

In his will Lawrence left instructions to offer, at a price much below their worth, his collection of Old Master drawings to first George IV, then the trustees of the British Museum, then Robert Peel and the Earl of Dudley.

The 1950s saw the publication of two further works: Douglas Goldring's Regency portrait painter, and Kenneth Garlick's catalogue of Lawrence's paintings (a further edition was published in 1989).

Lawrence's entanglements with the Siddons family has been the subject of three books (by Oswald Knapp, André Maurois, and Naomi Royde-Smith) and a recent radio play.

Sir Michael Levey acknowledges that Lawrence is still dismissed by some art historians: "He was a highly original artist, quite unexpected on the English scene: self-taught, self-absorbed in perfecting his own personal style, and in effect self-destructing, since he left behind no significant followers or creative influence.

In the United States, The Huntington Library houses Pinkie, and Lawrence's portraits of Elizabeth Farren, Lady Harriet Maria Conyngham, and the Calmady children are in the Metropolitan Museum of Art.

"[42] In December 2018, a portrait of Lady Selina Meade (1797–1872), who married the Count of Clam-Martinic, painted by Lawrence in Vienna in 1819, sold for £2.29 million at auction, a record for the artist.

[43] In the 1848 novel, Vanity Fair, William Makepeace Thackeray refers to "...the Lawrence portraits, tawdry and beautiful, and, thirty years ago, deemed as precious as works of real genius...".

[44] A description of Mr Tite Barnacle of the Circumlocution Office as someone who "seemed to have been sitting for his portrait to Sir Thomas Lawrence all the days of his life" is one of 25 references to art in Charles Dickens' 1857 novel Little Dorrit.

[45] In his 1895 play, An Ideal Husband, Oscar Wilde introduces Lord Caversham with a stage direction that describes him as "[r]ather like a portrait by Lawrence".