Portrait of a young woman

The museum calls this a portrait study, and the young woman in it has no name. It dates from the early 1760s, the years when Joshua Reynolds had just moved into a large house on Leicester Fields, today's Leicester Square in London, and was receiving sitters at a rate few painters in England could match. A study like this, at about 76 by 63 centimetres, let him work out a head and a pose without the demands of a finished commission. British pictures are rare in this gallery, which grew out of Habsburg collecting, and this one came late. Vienna bought it in 1913 from the art dealers Thomas Agnew and Sons.