Lady Anne Fitzpatrick

When this girl was born, in August 1768, her mother was still the Duchess of Grafton, wife of the man who would be prime minister within two months. Anne Liddell had separated from the duke, and the child's father was John Fitzpatrick, Earl of Upper Ossory. In March 1769 Parliament passed an act dissolving the Grafton marriage, and that same year she married Ossory. Their daughter was named after her mother. By 1775 Lady Anne was six, and on the 10th of June Reynolds entered a payment in his ledger from Lord Ossory, for Lady Ann Fitzpatrick. It is a large canvas for so small a sitter, nearly a metre and a half tall, and her father kept it at Farming Woods, his house in Northamptonshire, and lent it to an exhibition in London in 1813. Anne never married and died in 1841. In 1927 the portrait was bought for Alvan T. Fuller, then governor of Massachusetts, and his foundation gave it to the museum in 1961.