Sir Thomas Lawrence, Charles William Lambton

This portrait of Charles William Lambton - aged six or seven - was commissioned by the boy’s father John George Lambton, 1st Earl of Durham, a Whig politician and MP for County Durham. Popularly known as The Red Boy, it stayed in the Lambton family until it was acquired by the National Gallery in 2021. It is acknowledged as one of Thomas Lawrence’s masterpieces and, a sign of the image’s enduring popularity, it was the first painting to be reproduced on a British postage stamp in 1967.

Lawrence was one of Europe’s finest portrait artists of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries and created some of the most memorable images of Romantic art. In 1792, he was made Painter in Ordinary to King George III, and, with his knighthood in 1815 and appointment as President of the Royal Academy from 1820, Lawrence went on to become the unchallenged heir to the British portrait painters, Thomas Gainsborough and Joshua Reynolds, and the revered seventeenth-century Flemish artist, Anthony van Dyck. Like them, he gained a lasting reputation for sensitive portraits of children and young adults. When The Red Boy was first exhibited at the Royal Academy in 1825, critics commented that the painting even exceeded Reynolds’ reputation in the field, with its ‘simple action and sweet expression of infantile nature’. Lawrence may have been inspired by the works of Lord Bryon and by William Wordsworth’s poem There was a Boy (1798), or it may allude to one of Lawrence’s own poems: ‘Proceed, dear boy, and climb the hill,/ Enjoy the morning of thy time/ And all the rocks of future life/ As cheerful and as active climb.’

Sitting on a promontory overlooking a moonlit sea, Lawrence portrays Lambton as a child wanderer, lost in contemplation of the sublime power of nature. The flowers opening at his side symbolise his young age. He is at the beginning of his journey through life, though this was cut short - he died of tuberculosis aged only thirteen. The poetic references of The Red Boy were picked up by people who saw the painting when it was exhibited at the Paris Salon of 1827. About thirty years later the French art critic Théophile Gautier spoke of Lambton’s ‘pearly visage so sombre and clear it conjures the look of the young Byron; that precocious dreamer astonished many Parisians.’

The painting’s nickname, ‘The Red Boy’, reflects the trend during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries to give portraits of children titles that included the painting’s dominant colour. The most famous example of this is Gainsborough’s The Blue Boy of 1770 (The Huntington Art Museum, San Marino) which is now thought to be a portrait of the artist’s nephew, Gainsborough Dupont. Lawrence’s early portrait of Sarah Goodin Moulton (1794, The Huntington Art Museum, San Marino) has long been known as ‘Pinkie’, her family nickname. After the sale of The Blue Boy in 1922, the Illustrated London News published reproductions of ‘Sir Thomas Lawrence’s equally charming portrait which we have named ‘The Red Boy’’. Lawrence’s portrait attracted further attention thanks to a popular story that Lambton’s clothes had originally been painted yellow. Unlike Gainsborough’s sitter, who wears a seventeenth-century ‘Van Dyck’ costume, The Red Boy is dressed in loose-fitting clothes; the contemporary fashion for children. Several of Lawrence’s young sitters wear these red velvet ‘skeleton suits’ which were roomier and better for playing outdoors and which, by 1800, had replaced Van Dyck dress for the children of wealthy families.

The gilded frame is original to the painting and was selected by Lawrence from the frame maker George Morant. This type of frame is often referred to as a Morant frame or a Lawrence frame.