Mrs Charlotte Frere

Mrs Charlotte Frere, painted around 1763 and now in the Lady Lever Art Gallery, belongs to the substantial tier of Gainsborough's Bath practice serving the prosperous professional-commercial class: the lawyers, merchants, and professional men whose wives required appropriate portrait documentation. The Frere family had connections to legal practice and overseas trade, representative of the Georgian bourgeoisie whose expanding wealth was creating a new market for fashionable portraiture below the aristocratic level. The Lady Lever Art Gallery at Port Sunlight, assembled by the soap manufacturer William Hesketh Lever at the end of the nineteenth century, includes this portrait as part of a comprehensive survey of British painting; the collection's industrial-commercial origins are an apt context for a portrait of the merchant-professional class. By 1763 Gainsborough's Bath prices were rising as his reputation consolidated, and Mrs Frere's portrait reflects the higher expectations that came with that reputation: his women's portraits now showed a consistent technical accomplishment that made them recognizably 'Gainsborough' even to audiences who did not know the sitter.

The portrait balances the careful finish Gainsborough's established Suffolk clients expected with the more fluid, atmospheric manner he was developing in Bath. The face is painted with sympathetic warmth, the treatment of the costume beginning to show the looser, more suggestive brushwork of his mature style.