Portrait of Mrs. Henrietta Smith (1735-1795), three-quarter-length

Henrietta was the daughter of John Dodsworth of Thornton Watlass, Yorkshire and was a direct descendant of King Edward III. She wed John Silvester Smith in 1761. Together, they had two sons, Edward (b. 1768) and Charles (b. 1775), who as the 2nd and 3rd Baronets, changed their names to Dodsworth. Dressed in a gentle pink dress with white sleeves, Henrietta plays an English guitar with an elaborate brass rose, a reflection of her cultural refinement and education.
George Romney recorded a Mrs. Smith of Newland Park in the June section of his 1778 sitter book, and Alex Kidson has convincingly linked the present portrait with nine sittings given by Mrs. Smith between 11 May and 6 July (loc. cit.). Kidson includes the portrait of her husband (op. cit., no. 1197; private collection, N. Yorks), but only tentatively endorses its traditional attribution to Romney, noting that `from photographs its style looks less than wholly characteristic, and closer to Francis Cotes'. The scholar further speculates that a situation in which Romney completed a commission left unfinished by Cotes, or possibly touched up a finished portrait of John Silvester Smith, and that on the basis of his work, was awarded the commission of the gentleman’s wife. The artist’s son, John Romney records the portrait of Mrs. Henrietta Smith in his Rough Lists under 1778 as a kit-cat, priced at 27 guineas, for which payment was received on 20 May 1779.