Mrs. Richard Brinsley Sheridan

Elizabeth Ann Sheridan, wife of the playwright Richard Brinsley Sheridan, sits on a stone ledge out of doors, turned toward the viewer in a soft dusty-pink gown with billowing white sleeves and a blue sash, a sheer scarf wrapped about her shoulders and her hands folded in her lap. Behind her the landscape is swept with feeling: heavy dark trees frame the composition on the right while the sky opens on the left in swirling grey-blue clouds with a golden glow at the horizon, a single windswept tree on a green hillside and a few sheep grazing below. Thomas Gainsborough worked on this, one of his most admired late portraits, in 1785–1787, and the informal, painterly handling — the luminous face and the rapid strokes of the dress — makes the sitter seem to breathe, set into a landscape as romantic as any of his fancy pictures. The painting is held in the National Gallery of Art, Washington.