The Honourable Mrs Graham
Thomas Gainsborough (1727 to 1788) · 1775 to 1777
Mary Cathcart, newly married to the Scottish soldier Thomas Graham, stands beside a column in a dress of shimmering pink and silver, a plumed hat on her head and an ostrich feather in her hand. She was about eighteen when Gainsborough painted her, and she looks out with a slightly aloof, slightly shy expression, as though she knows the dress is doing most of the work. The setting is a fantasy of a terrace with a dark landscape behind, a stage on which she poses like an actress in a Van Dyck costume.
Gainsborough was at the peak of his fashionable London career, and the picture is one of his most dazzling displays of paint. Stand back and the silk shimmers; come close and it dissolves into slashes and scribbles of pink, white and grey that look almost modern. He often worked with long brushes in a darkened studio to keep this effect of seeing the whole rather than the details. The tall, narrow format and the swagger pose deliberately echo the seventeenth century portraits that his aristocratic clients admired.
Mary died of tuberculosis in 1792, aged thirty five, and her husband was so grief-stricken that he had the portrait crated and put away, and never looked at it again. He went on to become one of Wellington's generals and Lord Lynedoch, and the picture stayed in its crate for nearly fifty years. When it was rediscovered after his death it came to the National Gallery of Scotland in 1859, on condition that it never leave the country. It has been one of the gallery's treasures since the day the doors opened.
Did You Know? Thomas Graham could not bear to see the portrait after his wife's death and kept it boxed up for almost half a century.
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