Jane Fleming, later Countess of Harrington

Jane Fleming was 23 when she sat for this, and one of the most watched heiresses in London. Her father had died in 1763, leaving her and her sisters to divide a fortune of 100,000 pounds, enough to make all of them prizes on the marriage market, and in May 1779 she married Charles Stanhope, the 3rd Earl of Harrington. Reynolds put her in a loose rose-coloured robe that belongs to no real wardrobe, and set her in the pose of the Apollo Belvedere, the ancient statue any educated visitor would have known from casts and prints. The open hand came from the stage, the gesture an actor made before speaking. The ostrich plumes in her hair are the one wholly up-to-date thing in the picture. Georgiana, Duchess of Devonshire, had just made them fashionable.