The sitter was the eldest daughter and co-heir of William Roe of Sudbrooke Hall, near Ancaster, Lincolnshire. She married Roger Pocklington (1734-1810) of Winthorpe Hall, Nottinghamshire, in 1774.
Angelica Kauffmann arrived in London in 1766, having spent the previous seven years in Italy, predominantly in Rome. While with few exceptions the artist's sitters while in Italy were men, either Grand Tourists or members of Rome's art community, on her arrival in England, in the company of Lady Wentworth, she was as Wendy Wassyng Rowarth notes 'very soon caught up in the network of female patronage' and '... the majority of portraits she undertook in the next fifteen years are of women' (W. Wassyng Roworth, A Continental Artist in Georgian England, London, 1992, p.103).