Miss Elizabeth Beauclerc as Una with the Lion

Reynolds painted Miss Elizabeth Beauclerc as Una with the Lion around 1777, casting a young aristocratic girl in the role of the heroine from Edmund Spenser's Faerie Queene — the embodiment of Truth and the companion of the Red Cross Knight. The Beauclerc family had distinguished itself through natural philosophy: Charles Beauclerc, Lord Burford, was a grandson of Charles II and Nell Gwyn, and the family's Twickenham connections linked it to the intellectual and artistic circles Reynolds inhabited. The 'portrait historié' — depicting living individuals in literary or mythological roles — was among Reynolds's most distinctive contributions to British portraiture, and his theorization of the practice in the Discourses gave it intellectual justification as an elevation of the contemporary into the timeless. Spenser was experiencing a significant cultural revival in the 1770s, his allegorical poem serving as a touchstone for the neo-Gothic sensibility that was beginning to reshape British aesthetics; Reynolds's choice of a Spenserian subject was itself a cultural statement. The Harvard Art Museums' holding of the canvas reflects the international market for Reynolds's literary subject pictures.

The portrait-allegory presents the sitter with literary dignity. Reynolds's handling combines portrait observation with poetic idealization.