Portrait of Three Women (formerly called 'The Honourable Mrs Caroline Norton and Her Sisters')

Whether or not this triple portrait actually depicts Caroline Norton and her sisters — daughters of the playwright Richard Brinsley Sheridan and famous beauties in early Victorian London — the attribution speaks to the painting's quality and the sitters' evident distinction. Caroline Norton herself was one of the most remarkable women of the early Victorian era: a poet, novelist, and campaigner for women's legal rights who fought a notorious custody battle that helped change English law. Etty's handling of three female figures in a group portrait required compositional skills he usually deployed in mythological scenes, and the result shows him applying the same warm colorism and attention to the material texture of clothing and skin that he brought to his Venus and Nymph subjects.

The three figures are arranged in a close, slightly pyramidal grouping that recalls Renaissance triple portrait conventions. Etty renders the fabrics — possibly silk, lace, and velvet — with the same material attention he gives to flesh, using loaded, confident brushwork to suggest texture without pedantic description.