SIR JOSHUA REYNOLDS, P.R.A. | PORTRAIT OF A WOMAN, SAID TO BE MRS. BARNARD

Anonymous sale, London, Christie's, 19 March 1892, lot 731 (to McLean);

Anonymous sale, London, Robinson and Fisher, 14 June 1895, lot 170;

With Dowdeswell & Dowdeswell, London;

From whom acquired by Jules Porges, Paris;

With Charles Sedelmeyer, Paris, 1897, no. 94;

T. J. Blakeslee, New York;

George A. Hearn;

By whom given to the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, 1909; (inv. 10.58.3)

By whom deaccessioned and offered, New York, Sotheby's, 15 January 1993, lot 119;

There acquired after sale by Marylebone & General Fine Art, Ltd., London;

From whom acquired. 

A. Graves & W.V. Cronin, A History of the Works of Sir Joshua Reynolds, London 1899, vol. 2, p. 5; vol. 4, no. 1260;

Sir W. Armstrong, Sir Joshua Reynolds, London 1900, p. 192;

B. Burroughs, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, Catalogue of Paintings, New York 1926, p. 290;

K. Baetjer, European Paintings in the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York 1980, vol. I, p. 154; vol. II, p. 256, illustrated;

D. Mannings, Sir Joshua Reynolds: A Complete Catalogue of his Paintings, New Haven/London 2000, vol. 1, p. 74, no. 111, reproduced vol. 2, p. 318, fig. 675.

Paris, Charles Sedelmeyer, Exposition de Portraits de Femmes et d'Enfants, 1897;

Ann Arbor, University of Michigan Museum of Art (UMMA), long-term loan, 2020.

Previously in the collection of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, this elegant portrait was likely completed in 1763, a year for which Reynolds’s Pocket Book of appointments and payments is lost. Mrs. Barnard was the daughter of William Browne of Co. Carlow and first wife of Thomas Barnard. The sitter only vaguely resembles the other known portrait of Mrs. Barnard, begun in 1767 and finished later (Private collection, UK).¹

1. See Mannings, 2000, vol. 1., pp. 73-74.