Lady Sunderlin

In 1785 King George III raised Richard Malone, a member of the Irish parliament, to the peerage as Baron Sunderlin, and a new title called for a portrait to match. Malone asked Sir Joshua Reynolds, president of the Royal Academy, to paint his wife life-size and full-length, and the fee was paid in November 1786. His younger brother, the scholar Edmond Malone, was one of the painter's closest friends. Reynolds used an old formula, the grand full-length that van Dyck had brought to England in the 17th century: a pale figure against dark trees, with an evening landscape opening on the right. The clothes are strictly up to date. The gold-shot gauze shawl, the gold embroidery on the sleeves, the loosely knotted sash and the blue band wound over her high powdered hair all follow the Turkish fashion of the 1780s. A fashion magazine joked in 1777 that an English lady dressed in this style could be taken straight from a polite gathering at home to Constantinople and presented to the Sultan without changing a thing.