Lady Alston

Gainsborough painted this in the early 1760s, while he was based at Bath, the spa town where fashionable England went to take the waters and be seen. Lady Alston stands full-length in a shimmering silk gown, posed against dark trees. The pose was not invented on the spot. Gainsborough borrowed it from a portrait by Anthony van Dyck, the Flemish master who had painted English aristocrats more than a hundred years earlier, and whose elegance Gainsborough studied all his life. Anne Alston had married into a baronetcy, and this is exactly the kind of grand, flattering full-length that Bath clients wanted. It hangs now in the Louvre, given by the Rothschild family in 1947.