Mrs. Richard Brinsley Sheridan

Thomas Gainsborough

National Gallery of Art

A pale-skinned woman wearing a long, rose-pink gown sits amid a lush landscape in this vertical portrait painting. The woman’s body is angled to our left, but she turns her head to look at us with green eyes under dark brows. She has a long, straight nose, smooth, flushed cheeks, and her carnation-pink lips are closed. Her long, curly, ash-brown hair is loosely pulled back in an emerald-green ribbon, but tendrils floating around her face seem to lift as in a breeze. A ponytail or thick tendril drapes over her far shoulder, almost reaching her waist. The low neckline of her gown is wrapped with translucent, gold cloth, and the elbow-length sleeves are gauzy white. The gown has a pale pink bodice and long, full skirt. Ribbons the same green as the one in her hair wrap around her waist and around the elbow we can see. She crosses her ankles so delicate, high-heeled, charcoal-gray slippers peek out from the bottom hem of her skirt. She sits on a gray boulder, her hands folded in her lap as she holds the ends of her translucent scarf. A tall tree grows along the right edge of the composition to arc up and over with olive-green and harvest-gold leaves. Beyond the woman, the land dips down to our left back into a tree-filled valley. Swipes of slate blue in the distance could be mountains. A short distance from us, to our left, one tree with a narrow, pale green canopy grows up against the sky. Behind that tree, yellow sunlight breaks through light blue, lavender-purple, and silver clouds that fill the rest of the sky. Parts of the scene are loosely painted with swirling, fluttering strokes, especially in the woman’s costume and the trees around her.