Cecil Gordon Lawson

Cecil Gordon Lawson, by Sir Hubert von Herkomer, 1877 -NPG 3889 - © National Portrait Gallery, London

© National Portrait Gallery, London

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Cecil Gordon Lawson

by Sir Hubert von Herkomer
Watercolour with ‘scraping out’ on white wove paper, laid down onto a second sheet of paper, 1877
19 1/2 in. x 13 3/4 in. (495 mm x 350 mm)
NPG 3889

Inscriptionback to top

Signed and dated in black watercolour centre right: ‘June / 18 H.H. 77’;
and inscr. in black watercolour top right: ‘To my friend / Cecil G. Lawson’.
Original backboard (discarded) inscr. in ‘large letters put on with a brush’: ‘Cecil Lawson / Heathedge / Haslemere’.

This portraitback to top

Herkomer gave this drawing to his friend Cecil Lawson. He inscribed it ‘June … [18]77’ but this could have been the presentation date, as it has also been dated 1875 and 1876.[1] Edmund Gosse records that Herkomer ‘painted much with [Lawson] at his finest period’; this would have been 1877–8, around the time of the portrait.[2] Gosse was also a friend of Herkomer’s and recalled a visit in the 1880s, and the frenzy of the Bushey studio: ‘We found him charming, full of cordiality and zeal, holding us with his glittering eye, painting a colossal picture with one hand and designing a giant advertisement with the other, practising mezzotint with his left foot and printing off portraits of himself with his right.’[3]

The drawing, which is life-size, must have been borrowed back after the sitter’s death in 1882. Herkomer used it as the basis for the drypoint that served as a frontispiece to Gosse’s memoir of Lawson, published the following year. The prominent remarque of the veiled naked woman, below the head, may be a reference to Lawson’s untimely death. There are small formal differences between the drawing and print – a higher cut-off point and better defined clothes in the print – but the main difference is in the expressivity, which is heightened in the later image.

A list of Gosse’s publications mentions a ‘small-paper edition of 150 copies’ as well as the illustrated folio edition of 200 copies of his Lawson memoir.[4] There are copies of the folio edition at the British Library, London (1759.c.4); New York Society Library; and the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco (Logan Collection of Illustrated books, 2001.8.4). There are also two loose-sheet copies of the portrait print at the National Portrait Gallery, NPG D9829 on Japan paper (ex-Gosse coll.), and an impression on cream card (both NPG Archive).

In 1953, after acquisition by the Gallery, the original backboard of the drawing was discarded (see ‘Inscription’) and the portrait, still attached to an old window mount, was given a new gilt frame.

Carol Blackett-Ord




Footnotesback to top

1) It is dated 1876 by Edmund Gosse in his memoir of Lawson (Gosse 1883, preface), which is also the year given in Graves 1892. Baldry (1901, p.116) reported that the drawing was made in 1875 and exhibited at the RIPWC.
2) Gosse 1883, p.30.
3) Letter from E. Gosse to W.H. Thornycroft, 11 Mar. 1881; Charteris 1931, p.146.
4) ‘Cecil Lawson: a Memoir, publ. The Fine Art Society, London 1883. There was a small-paper edition bound in light green cloth boards, of 150 copies and a large-paper edition, in white parchment boards, of 200 copies. It has not been reprinted’ (List of works by Sir Edmund Gosse in Charteris 1931, p.512). The quarto edition was apparently not illustrated.

Physical descriptionback to top

Head-and-shoulders, full-face, brown hair, gingery brown moustache, grey/blue eyes, black/grey jacket and waistcoat over pale shirt against a background of red, brown and grey toned washes, the highlights in hair and right of head vigorously scraped out.

Provenanceback to top

The sitter; given by his son, Cecil CP Lawson, 1953

Exhibitionsback to top

?The Royal Institute of Painters in Water Colours, 1875.

Reproductionsback to top

Other reproductions of the image
Gosse 1883, frontispiece (drypoint).

View all known portraits for Sir Hubert von Herkomer

View all known portraits for Cecil Gordon Lawson