Perhaps Mrs Henry Broughton (c.1750–1839)

The tentatively identified Portrait of Perhaps Mrs Henry Broughton, painted around 1775 and held at Kenwood House on Hampstead Heath, belongs to Gainsborough's mature London period when his female portrait style was at its most atmospheric and technically accomplished. The uncertain identification reflects the problem of attribution across a career in which Gainsborough painted hundreds of women whose portrait documentation passed out of family knowledge through successive generations of inheritance and sale. Kenwood, remodeled by Robert Adam for Lord Mansfield in the 1760s and now housing the Iveagh Bequest collection, holds several important Gainsborough female portraits that allow the development of his London period style to be assessed. By 1775 his technique had evolved significantly from the Bath manner: the atmospheric dissolution of form was more pronounced, the color more silvery and diffuse, and the landscape settings more idealized. Contemporaries described looking at his late portraits as like viewing landscape through a haze of morning light — a quality that both admirers and critics recognized as deliberate and radical. This portrait documents that evolution in the context of one of London's most significant country-house collections.

Gainsborough's mature London handling is evident in the fluid, atmospheric treatment of both figure and background. The face is modelled with warm, soft tones, while the costume and hair are rendered with the long, sweeping brushstrokes that became his trademark in the 1770s and 1780s.