Miss Morris

Reynolds painted Miss Morris during his period of greatest fashionable success in the 1760s and '70s, when he was establishing the Grand Style of British portraiture by infusing society likenesses with references to antique sculpture and Italian Renaissance painting. A portrait titled simply Miss Morris places the sitter within the broad category of young women Reynolds portrayed in gentle allegorical or pastoral modes, often comparing his subjects implicitly to classical figures without the explicit mythological apparatus of his history paintings. The identity of Miss Morris is not definitively established, but the treatment is characteristic of his middle period.

Reynolds employs the soft, painterly handling of his mature style — fluid drapery, gently rounded facial modelling, the warm light falling from slightly above and to one side that characterised his standard studio arrangement. His practice of using bituminous underpaint, which darkened and cracked over centuries, is evident in the uneven condition of many of his canvases, but the original chromatic warmth and compositional ease remain.