Lady Louisa Conolly

Reynolds painted Lady Louisa Conolly around 1775, depicting the daughter of the 2nd Duke of Richmond and wife of Thomas Conolly, the wealthiest commoner in Ireland. Lady Louisa was one of five sisters from the Lennox family — the daughters of the 2nd Duke of Richmond — whose lives have been documented in biographical studies as an exceptional record of eighteenth-century aristocratic womanhood. Her marriage to Conolly brought her to Castletown House in County Kildare, the grandest Palladian house in Ireland, where she spent decades improving the estate and engaging in the philanthropic activities for which the family became celebrated. Reynolds's portrait, now at Harvard, was painted during one of her visits to London; the large scale suggests a formal commission intended for display at Castletown rather than purely personal use. The Lennox sisters' collective engagement with Reynolds — he painted Lady Louisa, Lady Sarah Bunbury, and others from the family — makes them among the most comprehensively documented subjects of his portraiture, their individual portraits connecting to form a group biography of an extraordinary Georgian family.

The portrait presents the lady with refined elegance. Reynolds's warm handling creates an image of aristocratic beauty.