Ritratto di Anne, contessa di Chesterfield

Gainsborough began this full-length in 1777 and showed it at the Royal Academy the following spring, at the height of his London years and his long rivalry with Joshua Reynolds over the fashionable portrait trade. Anne Stanhope, wife of the fifth Earl of Chesterfield, stands in shimmering blue and white satin with her arm on a stone plinth, looking off to one side as if her mind is somewhere else. To the right the garden opens onto a distant view of the family's land. He painted her husband as a matching full-length at the same time, and the two portraits hung together as a pair for nearly two centuries, until 1959, when this one was sold and crossed the Atlantic on its own.