Portrait of Mary, Countess Howe

Portrait of Mary, Countess Howe, painted around 1764 and held at Kenwood House on Hampstead Heath, is widely regarded as the supreme achievement of Gainsborough's Bath period and one of the greatest full-length female portraits in British art. The Countess is shown in a parkland setting, her wide hat tilted to shade her face, her pink silk dress catching the light in a way that makes the fabric seem genuinely luminous. Mary Hartopp had married Richard Howe — later Admiral Earl Howe — in 1758, and the portrait was likely commissioned shortly after the marriage. Kenwood House, a neoclassical villa on the edge of Hampstead Heath remodeled by Robert Adam and bequeathed to the public with its paintings by the 1st Earl of Iveagh in 1927, provides the perfect setting for the portrait: an eighteenth-century house with its collection intact, exactly the kind of domestic context for which Gainsborough's portraiture was designed. Reynolds saw the work and reportedly acknowledged it as superior to anything he could produce in the same format.

Gainsborough's mastery of the full-length format is evident in the elegant proportions and the integration of figure with landscape. The shimmering pink silk dress, rendered with virtuosic brushwork, and the atmospheric background demonstrate his developing painterly brilliance.