Mrs. Richard Brinsley Sheridan

The woman in this landscape had been one of the most admired singers in England. Elizabeth Linley drew crowds in Bath and London until she married the playwright Richard Brinsley Sheridan in 1773 and, as was expected of a gentleman's wife, left the concert platform for good. Gainsborough, who knew her from Bath, painted her here in the mid-1780s not as a performer but seated out of doors, her hair and scarf loosened into the wind, the trees behind her brushed as freely as the fabric of her dress. Technical examination later found another version underneath, where she had been posed more openly as a shepherdess. She was in her early thirties when she sat, and would die of tuberculosis within seven years.