Richard Rothwell

Richard Rothwell (1800–1868) was an Irish portrait painter born in Athlone, County Westmeath. He entered the Dublin Society's drawing school at age fourteen and showed such precocious talent that he was taken on as a pupil by Thomas Lawrence, the greatest portrait painter of the age, in London around 1814. This training under Lawrence was decisive: Rothwell absorbed Lawrence's fluid brushwork, his skill in rendering fabrics and flesh tones, and his ability to flatter his sitters while maintaining a convincing likeness.

Rothwell established a successful portrait practice in London and Dublin, painting members of the aristocracy, literary figures, and prominent public men. His portrait of Mary Shelley (1840), now in the National Portrait Gallery, is one of the most reproduced images of the novelist and demonstrates his ability to convey both outer appearance and inner character. He also painted subject pictures drawn from literature and contemporary life, exhibiting regularly at the Royal Academy and the Royal Hibernian Academy.

He traveled extensively in Italy and spent time in Rome, where he painted portraits of British and European visitors. His later years were spent partly in Leamington Spa and partly on the Continent, where he continued to work despite declining health. He died in Rome on 13 September 1868. Rothwell is considered one of the finest Irish portrait painters of the nineteenth century, a worthy successor to Lawrence's tradition of elegant and psychologically penetrating portraiture.

Rothwell was primarily a portraitist working in an elegant, accomplished manner that owed much to his training under Lawrence and to the broader tradition of British Grand Manner portraiture. His portraits are marked by confident draughtsmanship, warm flesh tones, and a flattering attention to the sitter's presence and social dignity. He also painted subject pictures and fancy pieces in a manner influenced by continental Romanticism. His Irish background and continental travels gave his work a somewhat broader range of reference than purely London-trained painters of his generation.

Rothwell was one of the most accomplished Irish portrait painters of the early Victorian period and an important figure in the development of a professional painting tradition in Ireland. He is remembered particularly for his posthumous portrait of Mary Shelley (1840), one of the few likenesses of the author made during her lifetime. He exhibited extensively at the Royal Academy and the Royal Hibernian Academy and helped connect Irish artistic life to the mainstream of British Romantic painting.