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Attributions (who is it?) are frequently lost as paintings leave families and change from hand to hand. Since this is probably a copy, there are even fewer clues as to who was being painted.
The painting could also be a “figure study” instead of a portrait, meant to tell a story, portray a mood, symbolize a goddess, or otherwise be “about” something other than who is being shown.
This painting, though, seems to really be a portrait, even without a name. For viewers, the feel of the painting would have been one of elegant casualness and informality, but she may look stiff and dressed up to modern eyes.
For a late eighteenth century viewer, however, this would have been a relaxed, casual, private and intimate portrait. Why is this? The answer is in her hair, pose, dress and other details.
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In the style of Sir Francis Cotes (1726-1770)
Portrait of a Lady
Oil on canvas
Mercedes Lipscomb Collection
MSC Forsyth Center Galleries, Texas A&M University
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The young woman wears her own hair, unpowdered, instead of a wig, a strand of the soft brown hair curling across the back of her neck. As did most upper-class women of the time, she has probably plucked both her eyebrows and hairline, giving her the high forehead also seen in Isabella’s portrait.
She has no visible makeup, and her jewelry is understated, with twelve pearls looped through the hair and two large pearls on the left sleeve. The background is simple and plain, influenced by Dutch, Flemish and Spanish portraits.
In one very important way, however, this unknown young woman is not realistically depicted as an English gentlewoman. The difference is her clothing.
She is dressed à la grec, imitating, of all things, a member of a Turkish harem. What would lead an upper-class English woman, who would never have worn this clothing in public, to be shown this way?
The British of the 1700s were particularly fascinated by the Turkish “Ottoman Empire,” today’s modern-day Turkey and Greece. Lady Mary Wortley Montagu (1689-1762), whose husband was the British ambassador to the Ottoman Empire, was an especially prolific writer and commentator. This highly stylish woman also made famous “Turkish Dress” and this is what we see in the painting of the unknown woman, and in the Countess of Erroll.
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