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This portrait, painted by Lawrence during a time of personal and professional crisis, embodies his ability to channel his almost fevered sensibility into his art. His voluptuous handling of the paint on the canvas, combined with the virtuosity in his treatment of the various fabrics (fur, silk, linen) and the accessories of the setting, become themselves representative of his sitter's status, importance, and character; as with van Dyck's portraits of Caroline royalty and nobility two centuries earlier, the richness of the paint surface is used to express and to symbolize the aristocracy of the person portrayed. Lawrence's affinities with van Dyck extend both to his composition (which features a column that stabilizes and aggrandizes the subject, as well as a red velvet curtain pulled back to reveal a dramatic broad landscape) and to his use of the particularities of contemporary dress to evoke the sitter's immediate presence. Leveson-Gower's red silk watch-fob, peeking out from below his waistcoat, along with his gold pinkie ring, are intimate and personal reminders of his individuality-these are the "minute breaks and peculiarities" Reynolds sought to wipe from his own portraits in order to give them "the acquired dignity taken from general nature."1 Although adhering to the traditions of full-length portraits from van Dyck to Reynolds, the painting of Leveson-Gower is firmly of the Romantic Era: the overall aloof expression and attitude of the sitter (whose pose openly recalls that of the Marble Faun, an ancient Roman copy of an earlier Greek sculpture) combine with the melodramatic light effects that play around his figure to convey a sense of inner darkness worthy of a Byronic hero.
Born in Bristol in 1773, Lord Granville Leveson-Gower was the third and youngest son of the 1st Marquess of Stafford. His familial and aristocratic connections enabled him to move in political circles from an early age, and in 1800 he was appointed a Lord of the Treasury. In 1804 he became a member of the Privy Council, and in July of that year he was made Ambassador Extraordinary to St. Petersburg. It is likely that this appointment prompted the commission of this portrait.
Lawrence had the work well under way and perhaps almost finished by November of that year. Lady Bessborough, the sitter's longtime mistress and mother of his illegitimate daughter, wrote to him that month: "Lawrence told me (perhaps by way of ?attery) that your Picture had given him more pleasure than any he ever painted."2 It was still not ready by May 1805, however, and the sitter's mother wrote her son expressing great consternation at the delay:
I have not got your Picture. Lawrence has not touch'd it since you left England; he pays no Attention to my repeated Messages. He is accused of constantly keeping all the Pictures that are pay'd for, and of sending those unpay'd Home to receive the Money when they are finish'd. That is a sad illiberal way of going on.3
Indeed, the portrait was still in Lawrence's studio in Greek Street as late as 1806, by which time the painter's banker Thomas Coutts had compiled an inventory of his studio that lists this portrait alongside the sum of £147 (140 guineas)-the same figure that appears with other paintings of similar size still in Lawrence's possession. It is not clear whether this was the sum already paid to Lawrence, the sum owed on the picture, or (as is most probable) the total price to be paid. In any case, a year after making her irritated comments about Lawrence's lax and unprofessional business practices, Lady Stafford had clearly not received the painting. And, from notes in the painter Joseph Farington's diary of 1809 indicating that he had recently seen Leveson-Gower at the painter's studio, one may speculate that even by that late date the work was not yet finished.

1. Joshua Reynolds, Discourse IV, 72. 2. Leveson-Gower, 1:494. 3. Ibid., 2:66. Julia Marciari-Alexander

Julia Marciari-Alexander, This other Eden, paintings from the Yale Center for British Art , Yale Center for British Art, New Haven, CT, 1998, p. 108, no. 40, ND1314.3 Y36 1998 (YCBA)