The works in this collection are after the leading British portrait painter of the early 19th century, Sir Thomas Lawrence (1769–1830). The majority are original prints in stipple and soft ground etching by Frederick Christian Lewis (1779–1856)—and as such they represent fine examples of the great talents of both artists.

Lewis produced numerous engravings after Lawrence's crayon portraits, of which he gifted thirty-eight to the British Museum. The stipple and soft ground techniques—of which Lewis was a master—lend themselves perfectly to the faithful rendering of Lawrence's drawings: Lawrence, was, from a young age, a brilliant delineator of the human face in chalk, crayon, pencil or pastel, and this bravura is not lost in Lewis's engravings.

Sir Thomas Lawrence belongs to what is considered the golden age of British portrait painting—the age of Gainsborough, Northcote, Hoppner, Beechey and Reynolds. His drawings are exceptionally confident, spontaneous and intimate, and his resulting portraits are at once both flattering and authentic likenesses.

Frederick Christian Lewis was engraver of drawings to Princess Charlotte, Prince Leopold, George IV, William IV, and Queen Victoria. He executed numerous engravings after the Old Masters and eminent contemporary artists, such as Landseer, Bonington and Danby, for publications such as John Chamberlaine's 'Original Designs of the most Celebrated Masters in the Royal Collection' (1812) and 'William Ottley's Italian School of Design' (1823). His superlative skills as engraver led to his contribution to J.M.W. Turner's Liber Studiorum, a collection of seventy-one etchings with mezzotint, greatly influencing landscape painting.

The portraits in this collection have particular appeal, the sitters being children and young ladies—and indeed in the legendary 'English' salons of 1824–7, Lawrence's pictures of women, and of children, took his viewers by storm. When he first began to exhibit in Paris, towards the end of his career in the 1820s, Lawrence was greeted as one of the great, liberating harbingers of British romanticism, and awarded the Légion d'honneur. His portraits—fluid and flamboyant—can be seen as part of the movement that overturned all the old restrictions of classicism.