Selina, Lady Skipwith (1787) – Reynolds

Curator Aimee Ng bids farewell to the series with a discussion of Joshua Reynolds’s “Selina, Lady Skipwith,” currently on view on the fourth floor of Frick Madison. Seen here with a nosegay tucked into her neck kerchief and a pallid countenance (made more so by the application of poisonous lead makeup), Selina was thirty-five years old when she sat for this portrait and had recently married the politician and baronet Thomas Skipwith despite misgivings about the union. Her husband died a short time later, but Selina lived to be eighty, chronicling her later years in journals.