Mrs. Edmund Morton Pleydell

The Museum of Fine Arts now titles this picture with the sitter's own name, Anne Pleydell. She was born Anne Luttrell in 1731 and married Edmund Morton Pleydell, whose family had a large country house at Milborne St Andrew in Dorset, and Gainsborough painted her in the mid-1760s. The dress is the news of the day, a voluminous pink gown over a shimmering blue underskirt, with lace frothing at the edges, painted by a man who followed fashion closely. She lived until 1819, and the portrait passed down through her descendants into the 20th century. Then a London dealer sold it to a New York gallery, and in 1909 Robert Dawson Evans, a Boston businessman, and his wife Maria Antoinette bought it. Evans died that same year. His widow paid for the wing of the museum that opened in 1915 to show its paintings, named it after him, and in 1917 left this portrait to the museum in her will.