Oil paint on canvas
Tate Britain
Tate Collection
Works with images
Works on display
General Collection
Collection
<a href="https://www.tate.org.uk/art/artists/sir-henry-raeburn-437" aria-label="More by Sir Henry Raeburn" data-gtm-name="header_link_artist" data-gtm-destination="page--artist">Sir Henry Raeburn</a>
Mrs HW Lauzun
Bequeathed by Miss Henrietta Frances Todd Lauzun 1891
adults
individuals: female
landscape
Lauzun, Anne Neale
named individuals
people
portraits
Tucker, Anne Neale
woman
wooded
<p>This painting depicts Anne Neale Lauzun (1776–1861), née Tucker. Born in Bermuda, her family were part of the British colonial administration. She spent her youth in Bermuda before moving to Edinburgh in 1792. Henry Raeburn painted this portrait in Edinburgh, possibly to commemorate Tucker’s marriage to Lieutenant Henry William Lauzun in 1796. The strong central light source and loose brushwork in this painting, reflect Raeburn’s cultivation of his own unique style as his career progressed.</p><p><em>Gallery label, October 2023</em></p>
painting oil paint canvas
31 March 2012 – 16 September 2012
2012-09-16
31 March 2012 – 16 September 2012
2012-09-16
2012-03-31
Rijksmuseum Twenthe (Enschede, Netherlands)
2012-03-31
18th Century British Portraits
Loan-out
26 September 2022
26 September 2022
2022-09-26
Tate Britain (London, UK)
http://www.tate.org.uk/britain/
2022-09-26
Gallery 15
Collection based display
Mrs H.W. Lauzun
frame: 927 × 798 × 124 mm
support: 743 × 610 mm
Bequeathed by Miss Henrietta Frances Todd Lauzun 1891
<div class="text">
<p>This medium-sized oil painting by the Scottish artist Sir Henry Raeburn depicts Anne Neale Lauzun (1776–1861), née Tucker. She is shown seated and wearing a white dress in front of a loosely painted landscape of trees, hills and a warm orange sky. A large tree dominates the composition on the left, framing the sitter, who is positioned just left of centre. She gazes forwards, her face framed by dark curls and her cheeks rosy. Light pools around her face and upper torso, while her hair recedes into the dark background. Compared with the delicate handling of the sitter’s face, the brushwork becomes broader in the rendering of the sitter’s hair, dress, and the landscape behind.</p>
<p>
<i>Mrs H.W. Lauzun</i> was painted in Edinburgh in around 1796. While art historians have noted an affinity between Raeburn’s early style and portraiture by the English artist Sir Joshua Reynolds, whom Raeburn may have met in London, <i>Mrs H.W. Lauzun</i> was completed at a point of transition in Raeburn’s career (Thomson 2008). At this time he was beginning to move away from the influence of Reynolds, cultivating his own mature style as a portraitist. He developed a unique approach to rendering light, placing his subjects before a strong light source and surrounding them by a series of increasingly dark, loose brushstrokes for the background. It was this tendency that often drew the disapproval of contemporaneous art critics for the apparent lack of finish in his work (Thomson 2008). As well as being the result of Raeburn’s distinctive brushwork, the impression of coarseness also relates to his technique: he did not make preliminary sketches, preferring to model figures directly with brushstrokes. <i>Mrs H.W. Lauzun</i> is a particularly emphatic example of Raeburn’s distinctive style, compared for instance with a compositionally similar portrait from the 1790s, <i>Mrs Eleanor Bethune</i> (The Hermitage, St. Petersburg), in which the brushstrokes are more gently blended.</p>
<p>What we know of Anne Lauzun’s life speaks to the increasingly interconnected eighteenth-century world and Britain’s expanding networks of commerce and empire. Her life intersects with a particular moment of upheaval within the British Empire, as its territories contracted in America and its attention was increasingly turning to the Caribbean and India. Lauzun was born Anne Tucker in 1776 in Bermuda (then a British colony), at the outset of the American War of Independence (1775–83). She spent her youth in Bermuda, moving to Edinburgh in 1792. Raeburn was the foremost portrait artist in Edinburgh at this time, and while the precise dates and circumstances of this portrait’s commission are unknown, it may have been intended to commemorate Tucker’s marriage to Lieutenant Henry William Lauzun in Edinburgh in 1796 (Davies 1946, p.108). The couple had met when Lieutenant Lauzun, an engineer and successful businessman, was sent by the British Government to make a survey of the Bermuda Islands in 1790–1.</p>
<p>Anne Lauzun’s ancestry and parentage strongly connect her to the colonial history of Bermuda and to the British loyalists who supported the British Crown during the American Revolution. The Tucker family’s presence in Bermuda dates back to 1616, when Daniel Tucker was appointed as the second Governor of the island following its colonisation by the Virginia Company, a British trading company whose Royal Charter had been extended to include Bermuda in 1612. Anne’s father was the Bermudian politician Henry Tucker (1742–?1802), who was President of the Council of Bermuda during the American War of Independence. Her mother was Frances Bruère, daughter of George James Bruère, the British Governor of Bermuda from 1764 to 1780. Bermuda’s economy was primarily maritime by the eighteenth century, but there was a large population of enslaved African people working as shipbuilders, sailors, carpenters, blacksmiths and masons, among other roles. By 1721 the population of enslaved African people numbered 3,517 and continued to grow thereafter (Michael Jarvis, <i>In the Eye of All Trade</i>, Chapel Hill 2010, p.101). While Henry Tucker is not known to have owned plantations, his will of 1798 lists a group of unnamed enslaved persons among his legacies (‘Hon. Henry Tucker’,<i> Legacies of British Slavery Database</i>, University College London, London, undated, <a href="http://wwwdepts-live.ucl.ac.uk/lbs/person/view/2146665195">http://wwwdepts-live.ucl.ac.uk/lbs/person/view/2146665195</a>, accessed 11th July 2022). Bermuda remained a British colony after the American War of Independence ended in 1783. Owing to its strategically advantageous position at the mid-point between Nova Scotia and the West Indies, it took on particular importance as a fulcrum of Britain’s naval influence in American waters throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.</p>
<p>
<i>Mrs H.W. Lauzun</i> was bequeathed to the National Gallery in 1891 by Anne and Henry Lauzun’s daughter Henrietta Frances Tod Lauzun, and it entered the Tate collection in 1955. In 1935, the painting and its sitter had been the subject of a short biographical study entitled <i>Story of a Portrait</i>, written by Mrs George (Mary Haldane) P. Coleman, who was married to a Tucker descendant from Virginia. In recent decades the painting has received very little scholarly attention. It has also rarely been displayed in Tate’s galleries, though it has been exhibited elsewhere on a few occasions, mainly privately in the rooms of government officials via its loan to the Government Art Collection. These include its display at the British ambassador’s Residence in Washington, D.C., and at 11 Downing Street, London, the residence of the Chancellor of the Exchequer. In 2012, <i>Mrs H. W. Lauzun</i> was exhibited in <i>Ladies and Gentlemen: Portraits from the British Golden Age</i> at the Rijksmuseum Twenthe in Enschede, where it was shown alongside works by artists more conventionally associated with the British ‘golden age’ of portraiture, such as Reynolds, Thomas Gainsborough, George Romney, William Hogarth and Sir Thomas Lawrence.</p>
<p>
<b>Further reading</b>
<br/>Mrs George (Mary Haldane) P. Coleman, <i>Story of a Portrait</i>, Richmond, Virginia 1935.<br/>Martin Davies, <i>Catalogue of the British School</i>, National Gallery, London 1946, pp.108–9.<br/>Duncan Thomson, ‘Raeburn, Sir Henry’, <i>Oxford Dictionary of National Biography</i>, Oxford 2008.</p>
<p>Caroline Anjali Ritchie<br/>July 2022</p>
</div>

Summary
2022-08-01T00:00:00
summary
SHORT_TEXT
<div class="text">
<p>This painting depicts Anne Neale Lauzun (1776–1861), née Tucker. Born in Bermuda, her family were part of the British colonial administration. She spent her youth in Bermuda before moving to Edinburgh in 1792. Henry Raeburn painted this portrait in Edinburgh, possibly to commemorate Tucker’s marriage to Lieutenant Henry William Lauzun in 1796. The strong central light source and loose brushwork in this painting, reflect Raeburn’s cultivation of his own unique style as his career progressed. </p>
</div>

Display caption
2023-10-26T00:00:00
display-caption
DISPLAY_CAPTION
adults individuals: female landscape Lauzun, Anne Neale named individuals people portraits Tucker, Anne Neale woman wooded