Portrait of Miss Mary Powis, afterwards Lady Stopford and Countess of Courtown, half-length, in a white dress and a corsage of pink roses, feigned oval

Details

Sir Joshua Reynolds, P.R.A. (1723-1792)
Portrait of Miss Mary Powis, afterwards Lady Stopford and Countess of Courtown, half-length, in a white dress and a corsage of pink roses, feigned oval
oil on canvas
30¼ x 25 in. (77 x 63.5 cm.)

Provenance

By descent from the sitter to the 5th Earl of Courtown (d.1914).
with Knoedler's.
Given to the Dayton Art Institute, Ohio, in memory of Mr and Mrs James A. Chew.

Literature

A. Graves and W.V. Cronin, A History of the Works of Sir Joshua Reynolds, P.R.A., London, 1899, II, p. 769.
E.K. Waterhouse, Reynolds, London, 1941, no. 51.
D. Mannings, Sir Joshua Reynolds, A Complete Catalogue of His Paintings, New Haven and London, 2000, p.380, no. 1466.

Engraved

A.N. Saunders.

Special notice

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Lot Essay

The sitter was the younger daughter and coheiress of Richard Powis of Hintelsham Hall, Suffolk, and his wife, Lady Mary Brudenell. On 22 August 1761 Lady Kildare wrote to her husband 'Mr. Stopford is going to be marry'd to a relation of mine ... a pretty agreable girl, Miss Powis, daughter to Lady Mary Bowlby [formerly Brudenell, daughter of George, 3rd Earl of Cardigan, remarried], she has a £20,000 fortune' (B. Fitzgerald, Correspondence of Emily, Duchess of Leinster, 3 Vols, Dublin, 1949-53, I, p.106). She married James Stopford, afterwards 2nd Earl of Courtown (1731-1810), on 19 April 1762. The sitter's elder sister Elizabeth Powis (1736-1826) was also painted by Reynolds (Mannings, op.cit., pp. 379-80, no. 1465). Reynolds's sitters' books appear to indicate that the sitter was most likely painted in 1762.

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