Lady Worsley

Reynolds's portrait of Lady Worsley from 1779 acquires its most interesting dimensions from what followed its creation. The sitter — Seymour Dorothy Fleming, wife of Sir Richard Worsley of Appuldurcombe — was painted in a military-style riding habit that projects confident independence, a pose that Reynolds associated with aristocratic self-possession. Just three years later, the Worsley case became one of the great sensations of Georgian legal culture: Sir Richard sued George Maurice Bisset for criminal conversation (the legal term for adultery), but the trial revealed that Lady Worsley had conducted affairs with no fewer than twenty-seven men, some with her husband's apparent connivance. The jury's derisory damage award of a single shilling signaled their contempt for a husband who had apparently facilitated his wife's conduct. Lady Worsley subsequently lived separately from her husband and died in Paris decades later. Reynolds's portrait, painted before the scandal, shows the woman with a kind of assured independence — perhaps reflecting qualities that Reynolds observed in her directly. Now at Harewood House, the canvas has become a document of the complex negotiations over women's autonomy and social transgression in Georgian England.

Reynolds presents Lady Worsley in his characteristic Grand Manner, using warm coloring and a landscape backdrop. The fluid handling and luminous flesh tones demonstrate his mastery of the society portrait.