Portrait of Isabella Thorold

Portrait of Isabella Thorold (1754)

One of a pair of portraits, painted just before the marriage of Thomas Middleton-Trollope and Isabella Thorold on 14 August 1759, commissioned by Mr and Mrs Middleton-Trollope.

Isabella is ‘wearing a low-cut gold-coloured dress, a blue cloak with a matching blue ribbon at her neck, a pink rose at her bosom’.

There are appointments on March 19th (eleven thirty), March 28th (at eleven) April 4th (at one), April 5th (at eleven), April 18th (Reynolds wrote ‘5’…) and April 19th (at ten). A Payment of £7.17s.6d from Miss Thorold is recorded in the ledger before April 14th, 1761; this is followed by a payment of the same sum by Mr Trollope.†

The two portraits descended separately, Isabella went to her own family, while her husband’s portrait (Thomas Middleton-Trollope) went to his family. They are, however, in identical frames.

‘An earlier painting depicts Miss Thorold wearing a pink dress decorated with lace, with no jewellery but with pearls in her hair’.† †

About the Artist

Joshua Reynolds (1723 – 1792)

As first president and founder member of the Royal Academy, Joshua Reynolds was one of the most celebrated artists in Europe. Reynolds was born in Devon and he travelled in Italy for three years before setting up as a portrait painter. He drew on his study of classical antiquity and Italian painting and produced portraits in the Grand Manner, filling his paintings with heroic and moral symbolism in an attempt to raise the status of the genre.

With his rival Thomas Gainsborough, he was the dominant English portraitist of the second half of the 18th century. He was a socialite, a self publicist, and ‘a driving force in the emergence of eighteenth-century celebrity culture’. His portraits provided a public image of some of the most famous and fashionable men and women of the period.

Reynolds was a prolific, popular painter and influential teacher and theorist, delivering his Discourses on Art to students and members of the Royal Academy between 1769 – 1790. He became Principal painter to King George III in 1784 (Andrea Martin, The Art Fund 2007/2008 Review).