Mrs Oswald

In 1763 the Seven Years' War had just ended, and Richard Oswald, a Scottish merchant, had done very well from it, supplying bread to the British armies fighting in Germany. He also had a share in Bunce Island, a slave-trading post on the Sierra Leone River. His wife Mary, painted here by Zoffany around 1763 or 1764, brought a fortune of her own. She was the only child of a Glasgow-born merchant who had settled in Jamaica and acquired plantations there. The portrait, one of the largest Zoffany painted, was probably meant for Auchincruive, the estate near Ayr that Oswald bought in 1759, where the architect Robert Adam designed their house. She sits alone by a boulder under a slanting tree, in lustrous blue taffeta and lace. The straw hat on her lap came from the painter's own box of props.