Elizabeth (née Gunning), Baroness Hamilton of Hameldon and Duchess of Argyll

Sir Joshua Reynolds, 1723–1792

ca. 1760

Oil on canvas

Yale Center for British Art

A woman in a white dress and a red and ermine-trimmed robe stands leaning against a stone ledge. She is in an outdoor setting with trees and a cloudy sky. Joshua Reynolds exhibited his full-length portrait of Elizabeth Gunning in the very first exhibition of contemporary art in Britain in 1760. It created a sensation and helped establish Reynolds as the leading painter of his generation. The Duchess was considered one the most beautiful woman of the age, so celebrated that crowds would gather wherever she traveled just to get a glimpse of her. Reynolds presents her as a modern Venus by giving her a pair of doves, the goddess’s attribute, and placing her alongside a fictive relief of the Judgment of Paris. The Duke of Hamilton, her dissolute first husband, commissioned the portrait sho