Maria Anne Fitzherbert (née Smythe)

When Reynolds painted this in 1788, the sitter held a dangerous secret. Three years earlier Maria Fitzherbert, a twice-widowed Catholic, had married George, the Prince of Wales and future king, in a private ceremony that broke two laws at once: as a royal he needed the king's consent, which he never had, and as a Catholic she could never be queen. The marriage was real to them and void to the state, and it had to stay hidden. Reynolds, then head of the Royal Academy, gives her calm and respectable, nothing of the scandal on show. The attachment outlasted everything, his official marriage to Caroline of Brunswick and all his affairs. When George died in 1830, he was buried with a small portrait of Maria around his neck.