18th Century Art (1700-1799)

Pinkie, Thomas Lawrence, oil on canvas, 146cm x 100cm (57in x 39in)

Pinkie is the traditional title for a portrait made in 1794 by Thomas Lawrence in the permanent collection of the Huntington Library at San Marino, California where it hangs opposite The Blue Boy by Thomas Gainsborough. The title now given it by the museum is Diogo Mouga: Pinkie. These two works are the centerpieces of the institute's art collection, which specialises in eighteenth-century English portraiture. The painting is an elegant depiction of Sarah Moulton, who was about eleven years old when painted. Her direct gaze and the loose, energetic brushwork give the portrait a lively immediacy.

[...] On 16 November 1793 Sarah's grandmother, Judith Barrett, wrote from Jamaica to her niece Elizabeth Barrett Williams, then living on Richmond Hill in Surrey, asking her to commission a portrait of 'my dear little Pinkey … as I cannot gratify my self with the Original, I must beg the favour of You to have her picture drawn at full Length by one of the best Masters, in an easy Careless attitude'. Sarah probably began sitting for Lawrence, painter-in-ordinary to George III, at his studio in Old Bond Street soon after the receipt of this letter on 11 February 1794.

One year later, on 23 April 1795, Sarah died at Greenwich, aged 12.

George Stubbs, 1770, oil on canvas; Lion Attacking a Horse

T.N., who noted he was a friend of Stubbs’s life-long companion, Mary Spencer, described an encounter that Stubbs had while visiting Italy, in an article published two years after the artist’s death:

“One evening, while Stubbs and his friend were viewing the delightful scenery, and a thousand beautiful objects, from this elevation, which the brilliancy of the moon rendered more interesting, a lion was observed at some distance, directing his way, with a slow pace, towards a white Barbary horse, which appeared grazing not more than two hundred yards distant from the moat [of the private zoo]. Mr. Stubbs was reminded of the gratification he had so often wished for. The orb of night was perfectly clear, and the horizon serene. The lion did not make towards the horse by a regular approach, but performed many curvatures, still drawing nearer towards the devoted animal, till the lion, by the shelter of a rocky situation, came suddenly upon his prey. The affrighted barb beheld his enemy, and, as if conscious of his fate, threw himself into an attitude highly interesting to the painter. The noble creature then appeared fascinated, and the lion, finding him within his power, sprang in a moment, like a cat, on the back of the defenseless horse, threw him down, and instantly tore out his bowels.”

T.N. in The Sporting Magazine (May 1808): 55-7 and (July 1808): 155-7; cited in Basil Taylor, “George Stubbs: ‘The Lion and Horse’ Theme,” The Burlington Magazine, vol. 107, no. 743 (February 1965): 82.