Rarely seen painting of Wellington set for National Portrait Gallery exhibition — theguardian.com

A grave portrait of the Duke of Wellington, left unfinished when the artist Sir Thomas Lawrence died, will go on public display for the first time in the UK in an exhibition at the National Portrait Gallery marking the bicentenary of the Battle of Waterloo. The painting, which is owned by private collectors in the US, has scarcely been displayed publicly anywhere since it was commissioned in 1829 by Lady Jersey, a society hostess who had been an ardent Whig and became an equally ardent Tory under Wellington’s spell. When Lawrence died, with only Wellington’s face finished, she refused to have it completed by his studio assistants.

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