A lady and her children by a cottage in a landscape

Katherine Read was born in Dundee in 1723, a member of a wealthy Jacobite family. She travelled to Europe following the failed rebellion of 1745, and studied under Quentin de la Tour and Louis-Gabriel Blanchet. Returning to London in 1754, she quickly established herself as a fashionable portraitist in pastels and oils. She gained a powerful patron in Queen Charlotte, who she painted with the infant Prince of Wales in 1761.