George Romney (near Dalton-in-Furness, Lancs. 1734-Kendal, Cumbria 1802)

The sitter was the daughter of William Ford of Waterhead Park, Coniston, and his wife Agnes, née Harrison. On 9 August 1785, she married Henry Ainslie (1760-1834), physician to Addenbrooke’s Hospital, Cambridge, and later to St. Thomas’s Hospital, London. The marriage produced eight children. Henry, the sitter in the present portrait, was the first of their five sons. He was educated at Trinity College Cambridge, and in 1813 became a fellow of Jesus College Cambridge, a year before his early death.

Romney’s sitter books record four appointments with Mrs Ainslie between 6th and 25th January 1787, the second of which, on the 10th of that month, coincided with her husband’s first sitting for the pendant portrait (untraced). Kidson (op. cit.) notes that the artist’s close friendship with the family may account for the absence of documentary evidence for the price of either portrait; this may equally explain the existence of an autograph version of the present work, offered at Sotheby’s, New York, 30 January 2014, lot 67 (see Kidson, op. cit., p. 38, no. 18 a).

This portrait is recorded in the collection of Alfred Beit at the beginning of the 20th century. Having amassed a considerable fortune as a mining magnate, the philanthropist Alfred Beit (1853-1906) was able to build up a fine collection of pictures from the late 1880s under the guidance of Dr. Bode, director of the Berlin Museum, which included many of the finest examples of the Dutch and English schools.