Georgian and Regency portraits: Ramsay, Reynolds, Gainsborough and Lawrence

Between 1714 and 1830, Britain was ruled by four kings named George. This page is about how that court and its nobility were painted: the official coronation portrait and the workshop that copied it, the idealised "grand manner" of Joshua Reynolds, the relaxed family groups called conversation pieces, the portraits brought home from the Grand Tour, and the royal pictures of Thomas Lawrence. The years of the Regency itself, with their dates, fashions and history, are explained in what the Regency era was. The main guide to European royal portraits places this period among the others.

What "Georgian" means

Tate uses Georgian for the style of the reigns of the four King Georges in Britain, from 1714 to 1830. It says the word usually describes architecture, furniture and silver more than painting, and that the period's unifying feature, if it has one, is a certain classical restraint and harmony. The Regency, the years when the future George IV ruled for his ill father, falls at the end of it.

The coronation portrait and its copies

The official image of a Georgian king began with the coronation. The Wallace Collection in London says George III came to the throne in 1760 and was crowned with Queen Charlotte on 22 September 1761. By December that year the Scottish painter Allan Ramsay was working on a new full-length portrait of the king in his coronation robes. The principal version is in the Royal Collection.

The portrait was in high demand. The Wallace Collection says that, as an official state portrait, the picture was highly desirable, and over 100 replica versions appear to have been produced, many by Ramsay's own hand. To meet the demand, Ramsay employed several studio assistants, who went on producing replicas after he retired in 1773 following an injury to his arm. The Wallace Collection's own version is a studio copy reduced to bust length. Ramsay had first painted George as Prince of Wales in 1758, and was made Principal Painter in Ordinary to the King in 1767.

How a full-length state portrait was posed, and why so many copies were needed, is explained on the page about royal portrait poses.

Reynolds and the grand manner

The Wallace Collection says Joshua Reynolds is known today for his portraits of the wealthiest and most influential people in 18th century Britain. He was born in Plympton, Devon, in 1723, trained with the portrait painter Thomas Hudson, and travelled to Italy in 1749 to study the old masters and ancient sculpture.

His big idea was the grand manner. Tate explains that the term described what academic theory considered the highest style of art, based on an idealised, classical approach, and that Reynolds gave it currency in fifteen lectures to Royal Academy students between 1769 and 1790. He argued that painters should seek a general, ideal form. The grand manner was meant for history painting, pictures of scenes from history, myth and religion, but Tate says Reynolds adapted it with great success to portraits, inventing the "high art portrait". In practice, Tate says, it meant drawing on ancient Greek and Roman art and on Italian Renaissance masters such as Raphael. The page on royal portrait costume explains why Reynolds distrusted fashionable dress.

Reynolds also shaped the institutions of British art. The Wallace Collection says he led the group of artists who founded the Royal Academy of Arts in 1768, became its first President that year, and was knighted in 1769. Between 1769 and 1790 he exhibited 244 paintings at the Academy, and only 32 were not portraits.

His studio was run like a business. The Wallace Collection says he relied on pupils, assistants, copyists and specialist drapery painters. In the 1750s he charged 48 guineas for a full-length portrait. When he moved to Leicester Square in 1760, he built an octagonal painting room at the back of the house where sitters rested in a leather armchair.

The Wallace Collection describes the paperwork behind a portrait. In a memorandum book he kept in the early 1760s, Reynolds recorded the colour and style of each sitter's clothes, any inscription wanted on the portrait and the type of frame. The clothes themselves were often shipped out with the portrait to the drapery painter. Reynolds also dealt with engravers, who turned his most famous portraits into prints for sale, and with a long list of tradesmen, from pigment suppliers and frame makers to the wagon drivers who delivered finished paintings. A Georgian portrait was often the work of a team.

The king's painter

Three painters held the post of principal painter to the king in turn. The Wallace Collection says that in 1784 Reynolds was appointed principal painter to George III, although the king was not particularly fond of his work, replacing Allan Ramsay. The National Gallery says that when Reynolds died in 1792, Thomas Lawrence was appointed Principal Painter to the King.

Lawrence and Queen Charlotte

Lawrence's portrait of Queen Charlotte, painted at Windsor Castle in 1789 when he was only 20, shows how a royal sitting could go wrong. The National Gallery tells the story. The queen was troubled by her husband's long mental illness and by events in France, and was in no mood to sit. The sitting on 28 September was probably the only one she gave. She arrived in a bonnet, and when Lawrence objected, she sat bare-headed. X-ray images show that he repainted her face several times to bring it to life.

The jewels carried a message. The queen refused a second sitting, so the Assistant Keeper of her Wardrobe modelled the jewellery for Lawrence. The gallery says the pearl bracelets, set with the king's portrait and monogram, were especially important to Charlotte, and that Lawrence gave them a significant role, as if to show her loyalty to her husband. Neither the king nor the queen liked the result. The portrait never entered the Royal Collection and stayed with Lawrence until his death, though it was praised at the Royal Academy.

Conversation pieces: the family at ease

Not every Georgian portrait was grand. Tate describes the conversation piece as an informal group portrait, popular in the 18th century, small in scale and showing families or friends at home or in a garden. The sitters talk to each other, take tea, play games or play with pets. Tate says the type was probably introduced to Britain in the 1720s by Philip Mercier, made popular by William Hogarth and Arthur Devis, and became highly fashionable with Johan Zoffany. It met demand from the new middle classes but also gained aristocratic and royal patrons. The National Gallery adds that Gainsborough painted conversation pieces too.

Gainsborough could also paint a couple full length in the open air. The National Gallery's Mr and Mrs William Hallett, known as The Morning Walk, shows a young couple arm in arm shortly before their wedding on 30 July 1785. The gallery says the groom commissioned it and paid Gainsborough £126 on 4 March 1786, and that its style draws on the earlier painters Watteau and Van Dyck. Tate says Gainsborough's female portraits show the influence of the French Rococo in Britain, which is covered on the page about Rococo court portraits.

Portraits from the Grand Tour

Young British noblemen often came home with a portrait painted in Italy. The National Gallery explains that the Grand Tour was a journey around the main cities and monuments of Europe, made by young men of the British upper class in the 18th century to complete their education, and that many had their portraits painted abroad by artists such as Pompeo Batoni. Its portrait of Richard Milles, painted in Rome in the late 1750s, shows him with classical columns, a map and a bust of the Roman emperor Marcus Aurelius, props that the gallery says establish him as a learned, cultivated gentleman.

A coronation to end the period

The Georgian age ended with a coronation of great expense. Westminster Abbey says George IV, who had ruled as Prince Regent from 1811, was crowned on 19 July 1821 in a ceremony that cost £230,000, with a new crown containing over 12,000 diamonds. His estranged wife, Caroline of Brunswick, tried every door of the Abbey to get in and be crowned, but the king had ordered the guards to refuse her. He died on 26 June 1830. The reign of Queen Victoria that followed is covered on the page about Victorian royal portraits.

The Regency Era style

Purrealism's Regency Era style takes its look from the end of this period. The gallery shows it on a whippet, a Bernese mountain dog, a pug, a golden retriever and a tabby cat, so you can see how it suits different coats. You can choose it in the portrait studio with one photo of your pet of up to 5 MB.