The Hon. Mrs. Thomas Graham

Thomas Gainsborough

National Gallery of Art

Shown from the hips up, an elegantly dressed woman with smooth, pale skin and ash-brown hair piled high on her head looks off into the distance to our left in front of a loosely painted landscape in this vertical portrait. Her body is angled to our right but she looks in the opposite direction with clear blue eyes under faint eyebrows. She has rosy cheeks, a small nose, and bow-shaped, apple-red lips set in an oval face. Her hair is streaked with brown and gray, and is arranged in a high updo with a long tendril curling down in front of her right shoulder, to our left. A string of silver pearls are wound through her hair at the top, and a few strokes of bronze-colored and white paint faintly suggest a veil or other head covering at the back of her head. Her dress is also loosely painted with dashes of pewter gray and honey gold. The low, curving neckline and cuffs of the long sleeves are edged with gold ribbon and ivory-white ruffles. A jewel, possibly a large pearl, hangs at the center of the neckline on her chest. She crosses her wrists across her waist and holds the fabric of the dress in one hand and a piece of bronze-gold fabric with the other. The landscape behind her has pine-green trees framing a deep, topaz-blue sky with parchment-white and pale peach clouds.