Mrs Mary Robinson (Perdita)

By 1781 the affair was over. The Prince of Wales had seen the actress Mary Robinson play Perdita in The Winter's Tale at Drury Lane when he was 17, written her a great many letters, and then left her for someone else. Getting those letters back cost him a cash settlement and the promise of an annuity, and out of that negotiation came this commission. Gainsborough put her in open country with a dog at her side, holding a small oval miniature of the prince, opened so his face shows. The picture went to the Royal Academy in 1782 and was withdrawn again after the press had already seen it. An illness in 1783 left Robinson partly paralysed, and she spent her remaining years writing novels, a sonnet sequence in the voice of Sappho, and a pamphlet arguing that women be educated as rational beings. The prince gave the portrait away in 1818, to a family who had stayed her friends.