Chopping up Sir Thomas Lawrence
January 9 2014
Picture: Christie's
There's a rather sad sight on offer at Christie's NY Old Master sale - a mutilated portrait by Sir Thomas Lawrence. If you look closely at the right hand of Lady Arundell, above (zoom in here), you will see that her hand is resting on a disembodied shoulder. Her husband, Lord Arundell, has long since disappeared, but you can see what he used to look like, below.
The provenance (and Kenneth Garlick's Lawrence catalogue raisonne) suggests that the portrait was chopped up in about 1914, when the picture went to America, and that the shameful culprit was a dealer called Robert C. Vose in Boston. A lot of this used to happen in the early 20th Century, when British portraits were all the rage in the US. The picture is now being deaccessioned by the Toledo Museum of Art.
