Katherine Durnford, later Mrs Utrick Fetherstonhaugh, as Flora

Painted in 1751, this early Batoni work depicts Katherine Durnford in the guise of Flora, the Roman goddess of flowers — a fashionable conceit that allowed female sitters to combine portraiture with mythological allusion. The practice, common throughout the eighteenth century, let painters and patrons alike signal classical learning while also flattering the subject's beauty through comparison with divinity. Katherine would later marry Utrick Fetherstonhaugh, and this portrait predates that union, capturing her likely in her late teens or early twenties. Batoni in the early 1750s was still establishing the formula that would make him Europe's pre-eminent portrait painter, and works like this show him negotiating between the idealising tendencies of history painting — his first ambition — and the demands of likeness. The wreath of flowers, the pastoral setting, and the loose drapery all invoke ancient precedents filtered through contemporary Rococo taste. Held by the National Trust, the work belongs to a tradition of country-house portraiture in which mythological fancy dress served to elevate the sitter above the merely social into a realm of timeless grace.

The soft, warm palette and relatively loose handling here differ from Batoni's later, more polished manner, suggesting an artist still developing his portrait idiom. Floral elements are painted with botanical precision, drawing on his early practice as a decorative painter, while the figure is rendered with careful attention to the play of light on pale drapery.