GEORGE ROMNEY (DALTON-IN-FURNESS 1734-1802 KENDAL)

Described by Alex Kidson as ‘one of the finest of Romney’s female whole-lengths’ (op. cit., 2015), this portrait was painted in 1780, the moment at which the artist was establishing his reputation as the most fashionable portrait painter in London.
Kidson notes that the uncharacteristically tautly-shaped figure, which is ‘offset by a particularly rich and sylvan woodland background’, compares closely to some of the whole-length female portraits in Romney’s Liverpool sketchbook (ibid.). Martin Postle first observed that the composition was closely modelled on Reynolds’s celebrated full-length portrait of the Duchess of Cumberland (Waddesdon Manor), a picture exhibited at the Royal Academy in 1773 when Romney was in Italy, but which he would have probably known from James Watson’s engraving of the same year (ibid.).
The sitter was the second surviving daughter of Edward Brydges of Wootton Court, Kent, and his wife Jemima, daughter of the Rev. William Egerton, Rector of Penshurst, Kent. In 1780, she married Henry Maxwell (1748-1818) of Ewshot House, Crondall, Hampshire. She died in 1789 in Harley Street from injuries sustained in a fire. Sittings for the portrait, which is thought to have been commissioned as a gift to the sitter’s father on the occasion of her marriage, are recorded on 27 May and 1, 6 and 10 June 1780.
The present picture was one of a number of important British full-length portraits sold in these Rooms by The Trustees of The Hursley Settlement in 1982: others included Lawrence's Portrait of Julia Beatrice Peel (1826; private collection) and Reynolds' Portrait of Jane, Countess of Eglinton (1777; Japan, Koriyama City Museum of Art). Sir George Cooper bought Hursley Park in 1902 and had it completely remodelled by the Aberdeen architect A. Marshall Mackenzie. Many of the contents were bought under the guidance of Sir Joseph (later Lord) Duveen.