Preparing for a Fancy Dress Ball

William Etty had made his name, and some notoriety, painting nudes drawn from mythology, hardly the obvious pedigree for a family portrait. So it says something that in 1833 the Welsh Conservative politician Charles Watkin Williams-Wynn asked him to paint two of his daughters. Charlotte, the elder, stands and helps her seated sister Mary fix a rose and ribbon into her hair, both got up in rich Italian costume for a fancy-dress ball. Etty laboured over it far longer than his usual pace, and when it hung at the Royal Academy in 1835 it did what he needed, proving he could please the English gentry and winning him further commissions. Etty was a York man, and the painting hangs in York today.