The Ladies Waldegrave

Sir Joshua Reynolds painted the three Waldegrave sisters in 1780, and the picture had a job to do. Their mother wanted it, and their great-uncle, the writer Horace Walpole, paid for it, hoping a grand group portrait shown at the Royal Academy would help find husbands for all three, who were then unmarried. So Reynolds shows them industrious and genteel, passing silk between them — Elizabeth Laura winding the thread at the centre, Charlotte Maria beside her, and young Anna Horatia working lace on a frame. It hung in Walpole's fantastical mock-Gothic house at Strawberry Hill, just outside London. The advertisement worked, and within a few years each of the sisters had married.