Lady Elizabeth Hamilton

In 1758 Reynolds wrote about 150 sitters into his appointment books, five or six of them on some days, an hour each, at his house in Great Newport Street in London. One of them was five years old. Lady Elizabeth Hamilton had lost her father that January, when the 6th Duke of Hamilton died still in his thirties, and the portrait was made for her widowed mother, Elizabeth Gunning, whose looks had drawn crowds in London a few years earlier. The child grew up to marry the Earl of Derby and to become the subject of a very public separation. The canvas was bought by the American collector Peter Widener in 1909, and his family gave it to the National Gallery of Art in Washington in 1942.