Catherine ‘Kitty’ Fisher, later Mrs Norris (d.1767)

Reynolds painted Catherine 'Kitty' Fisher around 1759, one of multiple portraits he made of the most celebrated courtesan of Georgian London. Fisher's fame was extraordinary even by the standards of a celebrity-obsessed era: her carriages were surrounded by crowds, her appearances in public generated newspaper commentary, and her portraits — Reynolds painted her at least four times — were engraved and distributed widely. Reynolds's decision to paint Fisher multiple times was itself a statement: he was demonstrating that the Grand Manner could invest any subject with dignity and that beauty, wherever it appeared in society, deserved the full resources of serious portraiture. The Kitty Fisher portraits belong to a consistent thread in Reynolds's practice of painting beautiful women from outside conventional society — courtesans, actresses, and women of ambiguous social position — with the same quality of attention he brought to duchess and countess alike. Fisher's early death in 1767, shortly after her marriage and social rehabilitation, added a poignant dimension to Reynolds's images of her. The Petworth canvas, now in a National Trust house associated with the 2nd Earl of Egremont (who may have commissioned it), demonstrates how Reynolds's portraits of Fisher circulated among their aristocratic admirers.

The portrait presents the famous beauty with characteristic elegance. Reynolds's warm handling creates an alluring image of Georgian feminine beauty.