2-745-478 - Heritage Art/Heritage Images

The Right Honorable Lady Mary Radcliffe (1732-1798), Wife of Francis Eyre, Esq., 1755. A founding member of the Royal Academy and one of the leading fashionable portrait painters of his generation, Cotes was a pioneer of pastel painting in England. Here, in her marriage portrait, the young Lady Mary Radcliffe is regal in a Turkish-inspired, peacock blue mantle decorated with gold and trimmed with ermine. Pearls and feathers adorn her hair and a décolleté scarlet bodice reveals an expanse of porcelain skin.