The Little Orator: The Children of Ayscoghe Boucherett

When Lawrence showed this at the Royal Academy in 1800, the catalogue called it The Little Orator and named the father of the children, Ayscoghe Boucherett, a member of Parliament. The orator is the boy in red, Ayscoghe junior, then about eight, with his three sisters around him, Emilia, the eldest, Juliana, and Maria, who was two or three. Their mother, Emily Crockatt, was the stepdaughter of the London financier John Julius Angerstein, and that family link caused a century of confusion. By the 1890s the picture was thought to show a different group of Angerstein children, whom Lawrence painted years later in a portrait shown in 1808 and now in Berlin.

Under that wrong name it turned up with a London dealer in 1893, and a Louvre curator, Paul Leprieur, crossed the Channel to see it. He came back enthusiastic, and nothing came of it. The painting stayed in English hands and was sold at Sotheby's in 1967, still as the Angerstein children. Its last private owner was Antenor Patiño, the Bolivian tin magnate, who lived in Paris. In 1975, when it passed through French customs on its way out of the country, the Society of Friends of the Louvre bought it from him for the museum.