Abstract

At the turn of the 18th–19th centuries an English court portraitist Sir Thomas Lawrence (1769–1830) was able to capture and reveal the character of his outstanding contemporaries who were associated both with Russia and Great Britain. The artist himself never visited Russia. Nevertheless, his work was known here, and Russian patrons and private collectors accumulated his works. The popularity of the artist is evidenced by the fact that several copies of his best works were made. In the first half of the 20th century part of these works were added to the collections of Russian museums, including the Museum of Fine Arts (later called the Pushkin State Museum of Fine Arts), where they have been held since 1924. The purpose of this article is to show the artist’s ties with Russia using the example of a small but diverse collection of Lawrence’s portraits from the funds of the Pushkin Museum of Fine Arts: Alexander I, Elizaveta Ksaverievna Vorontsova (née Branitskaya), Nikolai Alexandrovich Sablukov, Antonio Canova, Julia Peel (née Floyd), and Sally Siddons. The article compares the original painted images with their copies and written memoirs of contemporaries, gives descriptions, reconstructs the history of the creation of portraits and their copies, and briefly discusses the provenance of these works. The article also indicates the main phases of the life of Lawrence’s Russian models, relating facts about the patrons’ ties with both Russia and Great Britain. Although in general the work of Thomas Lawrence has been studied in sufficient detail by foreign experts, the article closes a certain gap. This is one of the first studies on the artist’s relations with Russia which describes Lawrence’s works from the collection of the Pushkin Museum of Fine Arts. The author provides unique data from the Archive of Foreign Policy of the Russian Empire, the archive of Prince Vorontsov, and also publishes for the first time in Russian the letter written by Robert Peel to Thomas Lawrence, dated January 17, 1825.