When George III was asked by Lord Eglinton to sit for the most fashionable portrait painter of the day, Joshua Reynolds, he replied: ‘Mr Ramsay is my painter, my Lord.’ Reynolds tried to gain royal notice with two speculative ventures – a portrait of George III as Prince of Wales (OM 1011, 401034) and an oil sketch for a depiction of his marriage to Queen Charlotte (OM 1012, 404353) – both of which remained on his hands. Reynolds was knighted by George III, made first president of the Royal Academy and Principal Painter to the King upon Ramsay’s death in 1784, but never asked to paint anything. That the Royal Collection has a fine group of Reynolds is entirely thanks to George IV, who commissioned portraits at the end of the artist’s life and acquired many examples of his earlier work. This work is one of the few examples which joined the collection later.

The sitter was the daughter of George III’s brother, Prince William Henry, Duke of Gloucester (1743-1805), and the wife he married in secret, the widowed Maria, Countess Waldegrave, née Walpole (1739-1807). This portrait was presumably commissioned by the sitter’s parent, the Duke and Duchess of Gloucester; it was exhibited at the Royal Academy in the same year as that of the Duchess (OM 1015, 4000698). It may then have passed into the collection of the sitter’s brother, William Frederick, Duke of Gloucester (1776-1834), for it was bequeathed to Queen Victoria by his widow, Princess Mary, Duchess of Gloucester (1776-1857) and incidentally daughter of George III.

The sitter, only a baby at the time, is shown lying in a landscape with her head turned to the front, wearing a white dress with a pink sash and a white and pink bonnet, her left arm round a Maltese dog while supporting herself on her right arm. Reynolds was famous for the variety of his ideas and especially his ability to enliven portraits of children: he often employs, as here, the suggestion of an affectionate intimacy between child and pet and comical suggestion that the two might resemble each other, at least in their manner of looking at the world.