Drawing after The Transfiguration

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Artist: Thomas Lawrence (British, 1769–1830)
Medium: Pastel on medium, slightly textured, gray wove paper mounted on linen
Size: Sheet: 46 1/4 x 29 inches (117.5 x 73.7 cm)
Museum: Yale Center for British Art
Rights: CC0 — no rights reserved

This very early work by Thomas Lawrence is a copy of Raphael’s Transfiguration (1520). Made when Lawrence was only thirteen years old, it proved to be a pivotal work in his career. The Transfiguration was Raphael’s last and most celebrated painting, left unfinished at the time of his death. It was in Rome when British Grand Tourists saw and admired it, except for a short period between 1797 and 1815, when Napoleon seized it and took it to Paris.

Grand Tourists commissioned copies of the picture, and Lawrence worked from one of those copies in the famous picture collection of Charles Hamilton in Bath, close to his childhood home. Lawrence sent his copy to London in 1784, where it won the prize of a silver-gilt palette and five guineas awarded by a committee of the Society for the Encouragement of Arts, Manufactures, and Commerce.

Text: Yale Center for British Art.