Maria, Lady Eardley (1743-1794)

Gainsborough painted this around 1766 in Bath, the spa town where fashionable England went to take the waters and be seen. He had moved there a few years earlier and built a busy trade painting the visitors, and the sitter was one of them: Maria Wilmot, a judge's daughter, shown at about 23, close to the time of her marriage. She would later become Lady Eardley. She faces us in a loose blue-and-white gown with pearls in her hair, holding a single flower. Gainsborough works the silk and the powder with quick, light strokes rather than careful finish, the manner that Bath clients came to him for. The painting reached the Nationalmuseum in Stockholm in 1966.