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See Also: Jane Allnutt, later Jane Carr

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Jane Allnutt, later Jane Carr
ca. 1825

Sitter: Jane Allnutt, later Jane Carr
British, 1818 - 1845

Maker: Thomas Lawrence
British, 1769-1830

15 x 15 in. (38.1 x 38.1 cm.)

oil on canvas

The Huntington Library, Art Collections, and Botanical Gardens. Purchased with funds from the Art Collectors' Council

Jane Allnutt was born in London in 1818, the youngest child of John Allnutt (1773-1863) and his second wife Eleanor Brandram (1789-1866). As purveyors of wine and brandy, her family had acquired considerable wealth and property since the early eighteenth century. Her father, a friend and patron of numerous contemporary artists (including John Constable, J.M.W. Turner, and Thomas Lawrence), devoted much of his capital to art purchases. Although in terms of social class he was a forerunner of the new breed of non-aristocratic collector, Allnutt followed the old aristocratic model, filling a series of great houses with pictures that he ultimately intended to bequeath to his children. Indeed, a signed label in his hand on the back of Turner's The Devil's Bridge, St. Gothard of c. 1803-4 (private collection) records that he had presented the painting "to my daughter Jane." Jane and her elder sister were raised at their father's palatial house in what was then rural Clapham. In the early 1840s they were joined there by their stepbrother's young daughter, Anna, later famous as the travel writer and photographer Lady Brassey (1839-1887), whose extensive photographic archive is in the Huntington Library. On May 22, 1845, Jane married Henry Carr (1817-1888) at Holy Trinity Church, Clapham. The nuptial festivities were commemorated in a group portrait by David Cox, Jr., entitled The Wedding Breakfast (private collection). Henry Carr later solicited Cox's assistance in organizing the posthumous sale of John Allnutt's collection at Christie's on June 20, 1863. The details of Jane (Allnutt) Carr's life are unknown. She is generally believed to have died in 1845, within months of her marriage. This small, unfinished painting of Jane Allnutt, the youngest child of one of Lawrence's most important patrons, sheds valuable light on the artist's practice and patronage. It was evidently begun when the sitter was about seven years old and set aside after Lawrence had completed the head, at which point his progress was no longer advanced by a schedule of sittings. With vigorous brush strokes, he has roughed in the profile of the girl's shoulders and neckline, and vaguely indicated the placement of shadows in the background. More painstaking brushwork delineates her hair and face. In these areas, Lawrence enlivens and glamorizes his sitter by emphasizing the sheen of her curly brown locks and by adding glistening spots of light to her eyes, nose, and moist red lips. He evidently intended to dramatize the portrait further through bold contrasts of light and shadow, brightly illuminating the left side of the painting, while eclipsing the right in shadow. It was for such dazzling effects of presentation, as much as for the fluid facility of his brush, that Lawrence was celebrated as a painter. Some months after beginning the portrait, Lawrence evidently decided to start afresh, taking up a second canvas and again working directly from the sitter. This unusual step was perhaps adopted out of consideration for (or at the request of) John Allnutt, whose generosity toward Lawrence called for special treatment. In the second canvas, Lawrence retained his original conception of the girl's head, gently tilted to one side with her soulful eyes trained steadily on the viewer. Subtle evidence of greater physical maturity is apparent in the longer and thinner structure of her face and in her slightly longer hair. The size (17 x 15 in.) and format of the portrait have also been expanded a bit to incorporate more of the sitter's arms and shoulders. Lawrence left both versions of Jane Allnutt's portrait incomplete at the time of his death in 1830. The Huntington painting was presumably dispersed along with other unclaimed canvases, but John Allnutt did put in a claim for the later version, which was then described as "Head nearly finished." Although Lawrence's assistants worked up some of his incomplete paintings before handing them over to their owners, John Allnutt evidently wished to preserve his daughter's portrait in its unfinished state, knowing that it was entirely by Lawrence's own hand. A collector of sophistication and a friend to many artists, Allnutt evidently took interest in the creative process of painters. Among the works he purchased at John Constable's posthumous studio sale in 1838, for example, was the artist's initial oil sketch for Salisbury Cathedral from the Bishop's Grounds. The portrait of his youngest child was the last of several paintings that John Allnutt commissioned from Lawrence. Shortly after marrying his first wife, Elizabeth Garthwaite (d.1810), in 1796, Allnutt had commissioned Lawrence to paint the two of them in a pair of magisterial full-length portraits of 1797-98, exhibited at the Royal Academy in 1799 (private collection). Around 1803 Allnutt commissioned Lawrence or another artist to alter his wife's portrait by inserting the figure of their daughter Anna, born in 1801, who is shown walking hand-in-hand with her mother. Elizabeth Allnutt died in 1810, and the following year her widower broached the subject of commissioning more pictures from Lawrence. However, there is no evidence that additional paintings were carried out at that time. When Allnutt remarried in 1815, he commissioned Lawrence to paint his second wife, Eleanor Brandram, in a head-and-shoulders portrait--a much less ambitious picture than those occasioned by Allnutt's first marriage. The portrait of their younger daughter Jane was to resemble that of her mother in being of the same head-and-shoulders format. This glamorous depiction of a beautiful child exemplifies the romantic idealization of childhood during the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Lawrence had established himself as a leading exponent of this cultural trend through earlier paintings such as Sarah Moulton Barrett: "Pinkie," but in the 1820s his sentimental, romantic approach to child portraiture reached its zenith with works such as Emily Anderson of c. 1821, Julia Beatrice Peel of 1825 (private collection, Canada), and Emily and Laura Anne Calmady of 1823-24, a work formerly in the possession of Arabella Huntington. In its unfinished state, this charming and individual portrait of Jane Allnutt provides a less mediated insight into Lawrence's response to a young sitter. It also affords a fascinating glimpse of the artist's masterly manipulation of paint, revealing a sparkling exuberance entirely appropriate to the youth and vitality of his subject.