Elizabeth Farren (born about 1759, died 1829), Later Countess of Derby

The celebrated actress Elizabeth Farren strolls across a heath with her white dress caught by the wind, a fur-trimmed cloak over her arm and a small dog at her heels. Sir Thomas Lawrence painted this portrait in 1790, the year before she married into the Derby family, and it is one of the great images of English elegance: swift, confident brushwork, a light-filled sky, and a sitter who seems to move even in stillness. It made the twenty-one-year-old Lawrence the heir to Reynolds and Gainsborough.