Mrs Elizabeth Carnac

Reynolds painted Mrs. Elizabeth Carnac around 1775, the wife of a man enriched by the East India Company — a 'nabob' in the contemporary slang that attached to those who returned from India with colonial wealth. Reynolds painted a substantial body of nabob-related portraits, reflecting the enormous flow of Indian wealth into Georgian Britain that funded a significant proportion of the country-house building, picture collecting, and fashionable consumption of the era. The term 'nabob' (a corruption of the Mughal nawab) carried both admiration for the wealth and social suspicion of its origins — men who had made fortunes through the Company's quasi-governmental exploitation of Indian territories occupied an ambiguous position in English society, sought for their money but looked down upon by the established landed gentry. Reynolds's full-length of Mrs. Carnac (over 240 centimetres tall) was among his grandest female portrait formats, suggesting a commission that sought the most prestigious possible statement of the family's social arrival. The Wallace Collection's holding of the canvas places it in an institution whose collections were partly assembled through nineteenth-century collecting of precisely this kind of British aristocratic portraiture.

The portrait presents the sitter with prosperous elegance. Reynolds's mature handling creates an image of wealthy feminine refinement.