Miss Susanna Gale

In 1763 the Seven Years' War had just ended, and Britain's Caribbean sugar islands were worth more to London than most of its territory in North America. The girl in this portrait was 14, the daughter of a Jamaican planter named Francis Gale, sent across the Atlantic to finish her education in England. She sat in Reynolds's new house on Leicester Fields, where he had made himself the busiest portraitist in London partly by borrowing his poses from the Old Masters. Hers descends from a full-length van Dyck of 1623, a Genoese noblewoman out walking. Susanna Gale went back to Jamaica and married a Royal Navy officer, Alan Gardner, in Kingston in 1769. The canvas itself reached Melbourne in 1934, bought with money from the Felton Bequest.