The sitter was the wife of Eustace Smith, MP, and (in the Ormonds' words) 'a warm, expansive woman with a past.' She had a series of lovers, including Sir Charles Dilke, whose career was to be ruined by her daughter, Virginia Crawford, in one of the most celebrated divorce cases of the day. Mrs Smith and her husband had artistic pretentions, creating an 'aesthetic' interior at 52 Prince's Gate in Kensington. Leighton, who knew then well and was a frequent guest at their house, painted a frieze for the dining room, and his picture Venus Disrobing (RA 1867; Ormond, op.cit., pl.111) was also (perhaps appropriately) in their possession. The architect responsible for the decoration of the dining-room was George Aitchison, who designed Leighton's famous studio-house (the present Leighton House) in Holland Park Road. In addition to the Leighton frieze, the room included two decorative paintings by Thomas Armshrtong, one of which, dated 1876, is now in the Laing Art Gallery, Newcastle. The walls were impressed with a pattern and gilded, and the dado had panels with inlaid designs of ivory, ebony and mother of pearl. Meanwhile Walter Crane was entrusted with another frieze in Mrs Smith's boudoir. 'This', he wrote, 'consisted of a design of white cockatoos with lemon and orange crests on a gold ground, connected by fanciful scroll-work in bronze green and red' (An Artist's Reminiscences, 1907, p.166).

There were a number of these decorative schemes in progress in London in the 1870s. They included Frederick Lehmann's house, 15 Berkeley Square, which had a peacock frieze by Albert Moore; 1 Holland Park, the home of Alexander Ionides; and, most famous of all, 49 Princes's Gate, where the Liverpool shipowner Frederick Leyland set out to live in the style of a Renaissance grandee. This was only a few doors away from the Eustace Smiths at no.52, and no doubt they were influenced. It is interesting that Leyland had owned Leighton's Venus Disrobing, the Smiths acquiring it after he sold it at Christie's in 1872.

Eustace Smith himself was painted by G.F. Watts in the 1870s. The portrait was given by the sitter to the Tate Gallery in 1910.