Frances Abington née Barton (1737-1815) worked as a flower girl and a maid for a French milliner in Covent Garden, before acting in her first play at the Haymarket Theatre on 21 August 1755 and becoming one of the foremost comic actresses of her generation. She married James Abington (d. 1806), one of the King's Trumpeters, in 1759, although their marriage was unhappy and they began living separately soon afterwards. Mrs Abington was later the mistress of several high-profile men, including William Petty, 1st Marquess of Lansdowne. After five years of acting in Dublin, Mrs Abington returned to London and at David Garrick's invitation, joined the Drury Lane company. In 1777, she acted in her most celebrated part, that of Lady Teazle in Sheridan's The School for Scandal, a part which had been written especially for her. Her last appearance was on 12 April 1799, as Lady Racket in Arthur Murphy's farce Three Weeks after Marriage. She died at her home on Pall Mall on 4 March 1815.
This miniature compares closely with an unfinished portrait of Mrs Abington by Sir Joshua Reynolds, P.R.A. (1723-1792), now in the Berger Collection, Denver Colorado (see A. Graves and W. V. Cronin, A History of the Works of Sir Joshua Reynolds, PRA, London, 1889, vol. 4, p. 1250 and N. Penny (ed.), Reynolds, Catalogue of the Exhibition at the Royal Academy, 1986, p. 247).