Portrait of Two Girls (Misses Cumberland)

On 20 January 1772 a new comedy opened at the Drury Lane theatre in London, The Fashionable Lover by Richard Cumberland, one of the most popular playwrights of the day. Its heroine, a young woman alone in London, is very nearly seduced by a villainous lord. In this double portrait, painted about a year later, Cumberland's daughters are reading it. Elizabeth, about 12, holds the printed play in a grown-up pink gown and gazes past it, dreamy, while her younger sister Sophia, in a plain green smock, leans over her shoulder and frowns at the words she cannot quite follow. Their father ordered the picture. He had met George Romney around 1768, while the painter was still making his way in London, and became one of his most ardent supporters. In 1770 he printed an ode to Romney in the London newspaper the Public Advertiser, and further verse tributes followed in 1775 and 1776. Romney in turn painted Cumberland, his wife and his children many times, apparently as tokens of friendship. The canvas passed down through Sophia's family until 1902. Elizabeth later married Lord Edward Cavendish-Bentinck, a younger son of the Duke of Portland.