Sir Uvedale Price, Baronet (1747–1829)

In 1794 Uvedale Price, a landowner from Herefordshire, published an essay that set off a long argument about English gardens. The fashion of the previous generation, set by the landscape designer Lancelot Brown, known as Capability Brown, had been smooth lawns, clumps of trees and curving lakes. Price found it dull. He argued for a quality between the gently beautiful and the overwhelming sublime, which he called the picturesque, and on his own estate at Foxley he kept old trees, rutted lanes and rough banks because they gave the eye something to work on.

Lawrence painted him around 1799, when Price was in his early fifties and the painter about 30. The title calls him a baronet, but Price received that title only in 1828, a year before he died.

The portrait stayed in his family for nearly a century. After the death of his nephew it was sold at Christie's in London in 1893, crossed to New York, and by 1903 belonged to Eben Jordan of Boston, head of the Jordan Marsh department store. His son Robert gave it to the museum in 1924.