Mrs. Robinson (Mary Darby Robinson)

In 1783 Mary Robinson was in her mid-twenties, an actress who had left the stage, a poet, and one of the most painted women in London. In 1779 the young Prince of Wales had fallen for her when she played Perdita in Shakespeare's The Winter's Tale, then dropped her, and the name Perdita stayed with her. In 1783 she was taken ill on the road to Dover and was left partly paralysed for the rest of her life. That winter Reynolds painted her for the second time, in a white dress with her eyes lowered, a portrait now in the Wallace Collection in London. The museum dates the composition here to 1783 and 1784 and catalogues the canvas as a copy after Reynolds, by a hand nobody has named. Its earliest known owner was Wynn Ellis, a London silk merchant who collected old pictures, and when his estate was sold at Christie's in 1876 it found no buyer and went back to the estate.