This painting is an early work by Ramsay, a leading mid-18th-century British portraitist. Ramsay derived the sitter’s pose from a 17th-century portrait by Anthony van Dyck, the influential Flemish artist who served as court portraitist to Charles I in the 1630s and early ’40s. The Young woman is shown in the guise of a shepherdess, a convention in portraiture that resonated with romantic notions of pastoral simplicity popular in England at the time. The sitter may be Margaret, Ramsay’s second wife, with whom he eloped in 1752.

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