Miss Philadelphia Rowley

Gainsborough painted this young woman around 1783, near the end of a long tug-of-war with the Royal Academy in London. The next year he pulled his pictures from its exhibition for good, angry that they were hung too high and too far from the eye, and showed instead from his own house. You can see why placement mattered to him. His late manner is all speed and feathery touch, the paint thin and flickering, a surface that dies under poor light and comes alive under good. Of Miss Philadelphia Rowley herself little is recorded beyond her name. The portrait later passed to Calouste Gulbenkian, the Armenian oil financier, and it hangs now in the Lisbon museum built around his collection.