Portrait of Elizabeth, Countess of Westmorland, full-length, seated in a white satin dress with gold and silver brocade, with a sprig of flowers in her left hand, her right arm resting on a stone plinth with the carved figures of Ceres and Proserpine

The sitter was the daughter and co-heir of Charles Nodes, of Sheephall Bury, Hertfordshire. She married Charles Fane, 3rd Earl of Westmorland, as his first wife in 1665, the same year that he succeeded to the Earldom.

John Michael Wright was perhaps the most sensitive artist of the Restoration Court. He was born in London but his family may have been Scottish and in 1636 he was apprenticed in Edinburgh to the portrait painter George Jamesone. In the early 1640s he went to Rome and became a Roman Catholic. In 1648, while in Rome, he was elected a member of the Academy of St. Luke. He is subsequently reputed to have acted as Antiquary to Archduke Leopold Wilhelm in Flanders between 1653 and 1656. Following his return to London in 1656, he soon established a successful practice. The Royal family were among his patrons and he executed portraits of King Charles II, King James II, and Prince Rupert (for which see O. Millar, Tudor Stuart and Early Georgian Pictures in the Collection of Her Majesty the Queen, London, 1969, I, pp.129-130).