Portrait of Jemima Ord (d.1812), three-quarter-length, in a white dress, seated playing a lyre, in a landscape, a waterfall beyond

The sitter was the daughter of William Ord (c.1711-1768), of Fenham, Newminster Abbey and Whitfield, near Morpeth, High Sheriff of Northumberland (1797), and his wife Anne, daughter and heiress of William Dillingham. As one of the owners of the Walker Colliery, then the most important in the North of England, William Ord made mining history with the sinking of the first deep mining shaft in 1762. In 1772, Jemima Ord married Thomas Charles Bigge (c.1739-1794), of Benton House, Northumberland, at St. Andrew's, Newcastle (for whom see lot 20).