Portrait de Mary, comtesse Howe

In the early 1760s Bath was where fashionable England went to take the waters, and Thomas Gainsborough had moved there to paint the people who came. Mary, the wife of the naval officer Richard Howe, sat for him around 1764, not long after the couple had married. He set her nearly life-size, almost eight feet of canvas, in a pink silk dress with lace at the sleeves and a wide straw hat, one hand on her hip, walking through open country as though she had paused mid-step to look at you. It was only his third full-length portrait, and he was still learning the format from the Van Dyck pictures he admired. The countess wears no jewels to speak of. The whole performance is the shimmer of that dress against a grey sky.