Kneller was born in Lubeck, studied with Rembrandt in Amsterdam and by 1676 was working in England as a fashionable portrait painter. He painted seven British monarchs (Charles II, James II, William III, Mary II, Anne, George I and George II), though his portraits of Charles II are not longer in the collection, and in 1715 was the first artist to be made a Baronet (the next was John Everett Millais in 1885). A set of portraits of naval heroes was given by George IV to the Royal Naval Hospital in Greenwich in 1824. In 1690-1 Mary II commissioned Kneller to paint a series, in Defoe’s words, ‘of the principal Ladies attending upon her Majesty, or who were frequently in her Retinue’. They originally hung in the ‘Water Gallery’ at Hampton Court, until it was destroyed in c. 1700, when they moved to their present location in the Eating Room below stairs, also at Hampton Court. According to Horace Walpole Mary II was advised by Lady Dorchester against the idea of having the most beautiful of her court painted: ‘Madam, if the King were to ask for the portraits of all the wits in his court, would not the rest think he called them fools?’ The sitter was said to be the most beautiful lady of the court, who married John Pitt in c. 1695. She is shown holding her hand under a jet of water from a carved fountain; she wears a yellow robe, over which is a grey mantle; to the left is a lizard.