Lady Worsley

In the late 1770s, with Britain at war in America and braced for a French invasion, militia camps sprang up across southern England and turned into a fashionable spectacle. Reynolds saw Lady Worsley at one of them, the great camp at Coxheath in Kent, wearing a riding habit cut to echo her husband's South Hampshire Militia uniform, scarlet faced with buff. He painted her in it in 1779, one gloved hand on her hip. Three years later she left her husband, and the divorce trial that followed aired so many affairs that the court awarded him a single shilling in damages. The portrait hung at Harewood House in Yorkshire for well over two centuries.