Lady Mary Carew (c.1710/1720–before 1762)

Reynolds painted Lady Mary Carew around 1746, another very early work from before his Italian journey. Now in the Burrell Collection in Glasgow, the portrait shows the young Reynolds working in the conventional English portrait manner he had learned from his master Thomas Hudson. The transformation that Italy would effect in his style makes these early works fascinating documents of an artist before his artistic awakening. Sir Joshua Reynolds, the first President of the Royal Academy of Arts and the most intellectually ambitious portrait painter of eighteenth-century Britain, combined the social function of the portrait with the elevated aspirations of history painting through his concept of the "Grand Style." His Discourses, delivered to the Royal Academy over fifteen years, codified the academic doctrine of painting in Britain, arguing for the supremacy of the ideal over the particular and the elevated over the mundane. His own portraits attempted to embody this doctrine: sitters placed in settings, poses, and costumes that associated them with the great tradition of painting from Raphael and Titian through Rubens and Rembrandt. Whether or not the attempt always succeeded, it gave British portraiture an intellectual ambition it had previously lacked.

The early portrait shows Reynolds's developing approach to female portraiture. The handling demonstrates emerging sensitivity to feminine character.