Thomas Lawrence, Pinkie, 1794, Huntington, San Marino, California

This sweet, innocent girl was born in Jamaica where he father owned a sugar plantation and the slaves to work it.  She was sent to England at age nine to be properly educated. Her aunt commissioned the painting to help her family remember her.  By the time Lawrence finished the painting, her father had “left” the family.  She died at age 12, less than a year after the portrait was finished.

Overly romantic and idealized, Pinkie floats with the clouds above her -- dark, ominous, stormy clouds. Did Lawrence foresee her death?  Did she already have the disease that killed her? 

Pinkie’s ribbons and dress float behind her, her hair is tousled, both blown by the breeze.  One push with her foot and she would become airborne like an angel.  She is still just a wisp of a thing, naïve and guileless, not yet corrupted with the confusion of puberty or the knowledge that “blood drawn with the lash” has brought her privilege.

The long energetic brush strokes animate the dress and reinforce the almost gossamer feel of the girl.  The dress captures the breeze as if a kite.  Pinkie gives us a hard stare, although we are drawn to her, she is not drawn to us.

The location of the artist is a bit mysterious – how did Lawrence get this perspective?  Was he lying on the ground?  Pinkie looks at us over the artist’s head – she doesn’t look past him, he doesn’t exist.  She engages us with a child’s direct glance.

Wordsworth’s poem so perfectly describes the painting, I wonder if he’d seen it.  Much more probably, the painting and the poem capture how the period thought of nubile girls.

SHE was a Phantom of delight  

When first she gleam'd upon my sight;  

A lovely Apparition, sent  

To be a moment's ornament:  

Her eyes as stars of twilight fair;          

Like twilight's, too, her dusky hair;  

But all things else about her drawn  

From May-time and the cheerful dawn;  

A dancing shape, an image gay,  

To haunt, to startle, and waylay.

-- Wordsworth, 1807

Both Wordsworth or Lawrence are drawn to the girls they portray.  Wordsworth and his Phantom do not talk to each other; it’s not evident that the girl even notices Wordsworth while he observes hungrily from a distance.  Since Lawrence is painting a portrait, it’s hard for him to pretend Pinkie doesn’t know he’s there.  It seems, however, that Lawrence was more drawn to Pinkie than she was to him.

The next time you go to LA, make a detour to the Huntington in San Marino.  The room with a dozen or so full-length portraits by Lawrence and his contemporaries is one of the great artistic pleasures.