Porträt der Caroline Fox, 1st Baroness Holland (1723-1774)

Caroline Fox, 1st Baroness Holland, was one of the most socially and politically connected women of mid-eighteenth-century Britain. Her husband Henry Fox was a controversial Paymaster General who accumulated great wealth, and Caroline was central to the network of Whig aristocratic society that dominated British politics in this period. Ramsay's 1766 portrait captures her in her later years, after she had been created Baroness Holland and at a time when her son Charles James Fox was beginning his political career. The German-language title — 'Porträt der Caroline Fox' — reflects the European scholarly cataloguing of this work rather than its original British context. Ramsay's female portraits from the 1760s show his technique at its most sophisticated: the soft luminosity he perfected after his Italian journeys is particularly suited to mature female subjects whose character rather than conventional beauty is the subject.

By 1766 Ramsay's technique was at its most refined. The smooth, almost porcelain surface of his female faces from this decade is achieved through careful layering of thin paint films over a well-prepared ground. The treatment of rich dress fabrics employs a different register — broader, more fluid strokes — that keeps the face as the painterly and psychological centre.