L'onorevole Miss Monckton

When Reynolds painted her in 1777, Mary Monckton was about 30 and already one of the sharpest hostesses in London. She was a bluestocking, one of the women who ran salons where the draw was talk rather than card tables, and her rooms gathered Samuel Johnson, the politician Edmund Burke and the tragic actress Sarah Siddons. Reynolds, first president of the Royal Academy and the most sought-after portraitist in the country, gives her a loose gown of white silk, a pale blue embroidered scarf in the Turkish fashion knotted at the waist, and a King Charles spaniel curled at her feet. She was known for her quick, teasing talk, and something of that liveliness stays in the tilt of her look. She never married, kept up her famous parties for decades, and lived to the age of 93.