Recollections of Sir Thomas Lawrence during an intimacy of nearly thirty years

Recollections of Sir Thomas Lawrence during an intimacy of nearly thirty years is a memoir written by Elizabeth Croft, a friend and correspondent of the painter Thomas Lawrence.*

The memoir, which exists only in manuscript form, gives some details of the sitting by Mr Norrell and Mr Strange for a portrait of the two magicians.^† While Mr Strange was an easy subject, Mr Norrell proved more difficult, constantly fidgeting and making complaints of distractions that seemed wholly imaginary. When Mr Norrell left the room briefly, Mr Strange confessed to Mr Lawrence that Norrell believed Lawrence to be secretly copying spells from Norrell's books behind the easel [35].

Notes

*. This manuscript is held in the Archives of the National Portrait Gallery, although the title is given as Recollections of Sir Thomas Lawrence P.R.A. during an intimacy of nearly thirty years (P.R.A. stands for President of the Royal Academy of Arts, an office which Sir Lawrence held for the last decade of his life). It further details Sir Thomas's interest in the morbid, telling of his post-mortem sketch of John Williams, the perpetrator of the notorious Ratcliff Highway murders, who was judged guilty following his suicide in his cell in December 1811.

†. This portrait is now presumed lost, having been removed from its display in Mr Norrell's library in the summer of 1815 [35].