This year is going to see a lot of time devoted to the 200th anniversary of Wellington’s victory over Napoleon at Waterloo. Already the British Museum has an exhibition of satirical cartoons by both French and British artists entitled Bonaparte and the British: Print and Propaganda in the age of Napoleon and the National Portrait Gallery is about to open Wellington: Triumphs, Politics and Passion. We are going to see an awful lot of images of the Arthur Wellesley over the next twelve months, particularly of the triumphant Duke painted shortly after his great victory in 1815. Wellington was painted by numerous great painters of the period, including Francisco de Goya, François Gérard and Antonio Canova, but his image was defined in a succession of portraits by Britain’s leading portrait painter of the period: Thomas Lawrence. Lawrence’s role as Wellington’s image maker has been the subject of much discussion, but the precise relationship between patron and painter remains less well defined.

We currently have a staggering portrait drawing by Lawrence of the Duke of Wellington’s three nieces: Lady Mary, Lady Emily and Lady Priscilla Wellesley-Pole. Executed in 1814 it is one of the most ambitious and impressive drawn portraits of Lawrence’s career and was clearly a commission of some significance for the painter. Our research has suggested that this drawing was possibly commissioned by the Duke himself as a wedding present for one of the sitters, Lady Emily Wellesley-Pole and that it is possibly the commission which first substantially brought Lawrence and Wellington together.

In 1814 Lady Emily married Lord Fitzroy Somerset the Duke’s military secretary. The three sisters were all close to their uncle and two of them had previously been painted by Lawrence. In October 1814 Lawrence was corresponding with one of the sitters, Priscilla, Lady Burghesh, who was then in Paris staying with Wellington who had been made Ambassador to France following Napoleon’s temporary exile on Elba. Lady Burghesh wrote to Lawrence noting: ‘I have not failed to mention to Ld. Wellington your desire of shewing the French your painting of Rolla, and he will be delighted to have a fine production of English art seen in his house, if its dimensions… will allow of its being placed there’, adding: ‘the Duke and I have fixed upon his dining-room as the best calculated to contain it, and he would admit all persons to see it… I have seen Mr. William Lock, who highly approves of your showing French artists that correctness of drawing is not exclusively their own.’ The portrait being referred to was Lawrence’s full-length portrait of the actor John Philip Kemble as Coriolanus which had been exhibited at the Royal Academy in 1800. In a letter dated June 1816, the Duke of Wellington confirmed the offer adding: ‘I will take care they [Lawrence’s paintings] shall be plac’d in a situation to do them Justice and to convince even the vain Parisians of the superiority of our English Artist.’ The idea that Lawrence – or his supporters, Lady Burghesh and his friend and patron William Lock II of Norbury - were concerned with demonstrating to French artists the ‘correctness of drawing’ is suggestive. Whilst ‘drawing’ here referred to painting, it could well be that Lawrence was aware of the drawings of artists such as Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres, then living in Rome and producing finely rendered and carefully composted group portraits of British sitters in Rome. The stark modernity of Ingres’s drawn portraits may well have prompted Lawrence to reconsider the medium.

Perhaps most compelling is the survival of a receipt in the archives at Stratfield Saye from Mary Smirke dated 25 May 1818 for a copy of the present drawing. Mary Smirke, the daughter of the painter Robert Smirke, was employed by Lawrence as a professional copyist, Wellington therefore owned a copy of the drawing which remains with his descendants at Stratfield Saye. This would suggest that the original drawing was at the very least admired by the duke, if not directly commissioned by him as a gift for Lady Fitzroy Somerset.