Oil painting, 'Paulina, First Wife of Sir Codrington Edmund Carrington', Sir Thomas Lawrence, ca. 1806

Half-length portrait of a young woman, seated with left arm over chair-back, wearing a white dress girdled under the breast with a gold buckle, blue drapery over her left shoulder and right forearm and a red coral necklace.

Bequeathed by Miss L. M. Carrington

Bequeathed by Miss L. M. Carrington to the museum in 1874, along with the portrait of Sir Codrington Edmund Carrington, museum number 1359-1874. Laura Carrington was a younger daughter of Sir Codrington Edmund Carrington (and his first or second wife?). According to Countess Evelyn Martinengo Cesaresco, granddaughter of Sir Codrington and Lady Paulina, who wrote to the Museum in 1927, ‘Paulina [elder daughter of Sir Codrington] gave the portraits to her sister Laura – who gave them to South Kensington [i.e. the Victoria & Albert Museum]’.

This portrait by Sir Thomas Lawrence of Paulina, Lady Carrington, is thought to date to around 1806. Much of what is known about the sitter comes from the copy of a manuscript supplied to the museum in 1921 by her granddaughter, Countess Evelyn Martinengo Cesaresco. This tells us that Paulina was the youngest daughter of John Belli, ‘of a noble Italian family but born in England’. Belli was private secretary to the first Governor-General of India, Warren Hastings. The sitter’s mother was of equally aristocratic heritage, ‘from the Spanish family of Bivar which claimed descent from the Cid and the sister of Pepys, the diarist, ancestress of all the Pepys Cockerells’. Paulina married in 1801 Sir Codrington Edmund Carrington (1769-1849) who was Chief Justice of Ceylon (1800-1806) but was said to have died young in 1823.

The museum also holds a related portrait of the sitter’s husband, Sir Codrington Edmund Carrington (museum number 1359-1874), also by Lawrence (see Kenneth Garlick, Sir Thomas Lawrence: A Complete Catalogue of the Oil Paintings, Oxford and London, 1989, no. 170). Originally it was thought that both paintings were commissioned at the same date, probably 1801-2, as companion pieces to celebrate the couple’s marriage. Countess Cesaresco claimed that ‘The Lawrence pictures of Paulina & probably also of Sir C. E. Carrington were done by commission of Mrs Belli [mother of Paulina] probably just before or after her daughter’s marriage’. However, Garlick states that the portrait of Lady Carrington appears ‘stylistically… to be somewhat later than [Sir Codrington] and it may have been painted after Sir Codrington’s return from Ceylon in 1806’ (Garlick, 1989, no.171). Seven years after the death of Paulina in 1823, Sir Edmund married Mary-Anne daughter of James Capel, MP (see Mary-Anne, Lady Carrington, Garlick, 1989. no. 172.)

The portrait is a typical example of Lawrence’s work, with head set against a background of dark brown to accentuate the sitter’s porcelain complexion. Lawrence’s luminous application of paint, giving areas of flesh a metallic sheen, prompted Lawrence’s contemporary John Opie to comment disparagingly that the general effect resembled tortoiseshell (Sir Thomas Lawrence, Michael Levey, New Haven: Yale University Press, 2005, p. 14). The sitter’s simplistic white neo-classical dress allows Lawrence to ‘explore… the gamut of tone provided by shades of white’ (Levey, 2005, p. 14).

Lawrence was the most celebrated portraitist of the Regency and Napoleonic age, both in England and abroad. His prodigious talent was early recognised when George III appointed him painter-in-ordinary in 1792 at the age of twenty three. Soon after, in 1794, the Royal Academy of Art elected him as a full academician. He later became its President in 1820, having been knighted in 1815. Lawrence was known for his technical brilliance and as well as painting oils, which showcase his bravura brushwork, he excelled in painting pastel portraits.

The sitter, Paulina, was the daughter of John Belli, private secretary to the first Governor-General of India, Warren Hastings. In 1801 she married the wealthy plantation owner and lawyer, Sir Codrington Edmund Carrington, who was Chief Justice of Ceylon (1800-1806). This portrait dates from the time of their return to England in 1806. Lawrence was the leading portrait painter in Britain during this time and he would have charged about £42 for a work of this type. He also painted Sir Codrington (V&A museum number 1359-1874) although stylistically, his portrait seems to have been painted earlier than that of his wife.

1360-1874