Madame Lowndes-Stone

Gainsborough had moved to London the year before, taking part of Schomberg House on Pall Mall after 14 years painting the visitors who came to take the waters at Bath. London meant competing directly with Joshua Reynolds for the same sitters. This portrait is from about 1775 and was almost certainly made for a wedding. Elizabeth Garth married her cousin William Lowndes-Stone on 15 July that year, and here she stands over two metres of canvas tall, in salmon silk under a transparent gauze shawl, with a spaniel beside her for fidelity. The full-length pose against open landscape follows the type Van Dyck had set for English portraiture 140 years earlier, which Gainsborough studied all his life. Calouste Gulbenkian, the oil financier, bought the picture in London in November 1923, and it hangs in his museum in Lisbon as number 429.