Portrait of Lady Mary Leslie

Reynolds painted Lady Mary Leslie around 1758, a portrait from his early mature period when the decisive influence of his Italian study was still fresh and each new canvas offered an opportunity to explore the compositional and tonal vocabulary he had absorbed in Rome and Venice. Leslie was a Scottish aristocratic subject, and the commission reflects the expansion of Reynolds's patronage network into the Scottish nobility that would eventually include several of his most important male portraits. Reynolds's female portraits of the late 1750s are among the most technically innovative of his career: the synthesis of Italian warmth with English directness was at its most experimental, and the results — visible in Lady Mary Leslie — have a freshness and individuality that his later, more formulaic female portraiture sometimes lacks. The painting's current absence from a specified collection suggests it may be in private hands or unlocated, a condition that affects a significant number of Reynolds's works whose provenance trails from the eighteenth-century art market have not been fully reconstructed.

The portrait is rendered with Grand Manner composition that characterizes Joshua Reynolds's best work. Oil on canvas provides a rich ground for the subtle gradations of flesh tone and the textural contrasts between skin, fabric, and background that give the image its convincing presence.