Misplaced Pages

Portrait of Lady Worsley
Artist	Joshua Reynolds
Year	1779
Type	Oil on canvas, portrait painting
Dimensions	236 cm × 144 cm (93 in × 57 in)
Location	Harewood House, West Yorkshire

Portrait of Lady Worsley is a 1779 portrait painting by the British artist Joshua Reynolds depicting Seymour, Lady Worsley. Worsley was the wife of Sir Richard Worsley, 7th Baronet, who she had married in 1775. She is shown in a riding habit customised to resemble the uniform of the Hampshire Militia which her husband served in. At the time there was a patriotic outburst following the entry of first France and Spain into the American War of Independence. The year of the painting a Franco-Spanish fleet threatened an invasion of England known as the Armada of 1779. Reynolds spotted Lady Worsley wearing her riding costume at Coxheath military camp. The painting was intended to complement a 1775 portrait of Sir Richard wearing his uniform. She later became involved in a notorious scandal in 1782 when she ran off with her lover, who was sued by her husband for criminal conversation.

In the painting she holds a riding crop in her right hand, an allusion to her skill at horsemanship. Reynolds was the first President of the Royal Academy and he displayed the work at the Academy's 1780 Summer Exhibition at Somerset House. Today the painting is in the collection of Harewood House in Yorkshire.

References

1. McCreery p.165
2. Rubenhold p.47-48
3. Rubenhold p.48
4. McCreery p.165

Bibliography

• Cruickshank, Dan. The Secret History of Georgian London: How the Wages of Sin Shaped the Capital. Random House, 2010.
• Esposito, Donato. Sir Joshua Reynolds: The Acquisition of Genius. Sansom, 2009.
• McCreery, Cindy. The Satirical Gaze: Prints of Women in Late Eighteenth-century England. Clarendon Press, 2004.
• Rubenhold, Hallie. Lady Worsley's Whim: An Eighteenth-Century Tale of Sex, Scandal and Divorce. Random House, 2011.

This article about an eighteenth-century painting is a stub. You can help Misplaced Pages by expanding it.

• v
• t
• e

• 1779 paintings
• Portraits by Joshua Reynolds
• 18th-century portraits
• 18th-century painting stubs