La honorable señora Graham

Gainsborough painted this in 1777, a few years after Mary Cathcart, a diplomat's daughter, married the Scottish laird Thomas Graham. She was about 20, poised in shimmering silk and ostrich feathers, at the height of Georgian fashion. She died in 1792, only 35, and her husband was so undone by it that he had the portrait crated and put away where he would not have to see it. He never remarried. He turned instead to soldiering and became a respected general in the wars against Napoleon, living another 50 years. When the picture finally came to the young National Gallery in Edinburgh in 1859, it arrived with one binding condition set by the family: that it must never leave the city.