Portrait of Mr. and Mrs. John Julius Angerstein

When this double portrait went on show at the Royal Academy in 1792, the catalogue did not name the couple. It called them a gentleman and his lady, the usual discretion of the time. Lawrence was 23. The gentleman was John Julius Angerstein, an underwriter at Lloyd's who would chair it through the Napoleonic wars, and the lady his second wife, Eliza, whom he had married in 1785.

Angerstein remained Lawrence's friend and patron for more than 30 years, and he collected Old Master paintings, partly on the painter's advice. When he died in 1823, the British government bought 38 of his pictures and took over the lease on his house at 100 Pall Mall. That house opened in May 1824 as the National Gallery, and Lawrence was among its first trustees.

This canvas stayed with Angerstein's descendants until the 1890s, and the Louvre bought it from a Paris dealer in 1896. The gallery his pictures founded in London owns a much later Lawrence portrait of him, painted when he was over 80.