Mrs Mary Nesbitt

Reynolds painted Mrs. Mary Nesbitt around 1781, depicting the celebrated beauty who was the companion of the elderly financier and art collector Robert Child of Osterley Park. Nesbitt occupied the ambiguous social position of a beautiful woman maintained by a wealthy patron without the formal legitimacy of marriage — a common enough arrangement in Georgian society, where wealthy men of mature years frequently kept younger women of considerable personal distinction. Reynolds treated her with the same dignity and compositional authority he brought to formal aristocratic portraits, and the Wallace Collection's canvas demonstrates his consistent refusal to reduce any sitter to the social category she occupied. Mrs. Nesbitt was also known as a woman of taste and cultivation who influenced Child's art collecting, giving her a cultural significance beyond her social position. Reynolds's late female portraits of the early 1780s maintain the standard of his best work despite his increasing reliance on studio assistants as his eyesight began to deteriorate; the Nesbitt canvas is among the more accomplished examples of this late phase.

The portrait presents the beauty with characteristic elegance. Reynolds's late handling maintains his mastery of the female portrait.