Portrait of Sir Hugh Owen (1786)
(pastel on paper)
by
Sir Thomas Lawrence
Sir Thomas Lawrence (1769 - 1830) was one of England's most distinguished and sought-after portrait painters of his day. A child prodigy and self-taught, Lawrence was earning an income from his painting by the time he was ten years old. Despite his commercial and critical popularity, Lawrence spent much of his adult life dealing with financial difficulties. A member of the Royal Academy in London, Lawrence served as its president from 1820 until his death. Lawrence is perhaps best remembered now for Pinkie, the female counterpart to Thomas Gainesborough's famous The Blue Boy.
Sir Hugh Owen, 6th Baronet (1782 - 1809) was an English politician, briefly a Member of Parliament for the shire of Pembroke until his death at the age of 26.
The full title of this work is Portrait of Sir Hugh Owen, three-quarter-length, in yellow and blue costume, in a landscape with his Newfoundland dog. While the dog - what little we see of it - does not look much like modern-day Newfs, it is certainly in keeping with other Newfoundland images of the late 18th- and early-19th Centuries.
This is not Lawrence's only portrait that included a Newfoundland dog: see also, here at The Cultured Newf, Lawrence's Mrs. MaGuire and Her Son with a Newfoundland Dog, Gus and his Mrs. George Frederick Stratton.
This is, though, the earliest work I have found which purports to show a Newfoundland that is largely black, althoug of course it is impossible to state that categorically due to the fact only a small part of the dog is visible. See also Daniel Clowes'A Pair of Hunters, Held by a Groom, with a Newfoundland Dog by a Lake (early 19th Century) and John Ferneley's Mr Pares' Coachman with a Newfoundland Dog (1823). At this point in history, the vast majority of Newfoundland dog images show the black-and-white variety now known as Landseers.