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This painting may have been commissioned to celebrate the marriage of Mary Little to Robert Carr, who became a baronet in 1777 on the death of his brother. Mrs. Carr, as she would have been called previous to that year, displays her well-adjusted and adorned figure to advantage, and her portrait clearly takes as its inspiration images of seventeenth-century English beauties by van Dyck and Lely. Like his predecessors, Gainsborough flatters the proportions and beauty of Mrs. Carr by setting off her features with the various fabrics and textures of her attire.
Her translucent white hands and face are indeed complemented by her dress and its accessories: her black-lace ribbon necklace, the transparent lace-edged kerchief over her breast, the elaborate tiers of lace cuffs and bows, and the radiantly textured pink silk. Gainsborough (whose sisters were milliners and whose father was a weaver) favored this type of pink silk, a glossy taffeta called lute-string or lustring, since it created flattering comparisons between the colors of the sitter’s dress and the rosy tints of her complexion. The artist gives life and depth to Mrs. Carr’s flesh—particularly in her left hand, modeled with flecks of greens, whites, and pinks—and draws a pictorial analogy between her skin and the leaves and petals of the spring bouquet she holds at her breast.
Unlike Reynolds—who painted his sitters unadorned by the trappings of contemporary clothing so as to emphasize the timeless qualities of their characters—Gainsborough revels in the depiction of Mary Carr’s stylish dress, a sort that was popular in England during the 1760s. A sacque or robe à la française, her gown has voluminous pleated panels of fabric attached at the shoulder blades that fall down in a train over the back of her skirt. Her bodice is decorated with three-tiered lace ruffles and bows, and some of the flowers at her breast may even be held there in a small vase inserted into her bodice. Her twin pearl bracelets match the larger pearls woven into her hair and in her pompon, a decorative hair ornament that moved and shimmered whenever the wearer moved her head. These details of her costume add what Gainsborough called the "variety of lively touches and Effects to make the Heart dance…[the] Lustre and finishing [that] bring it up to individual Life." Here, the artist’s virtuoso rendering of the sumptuous fabrics of her dress are all the more appropriate since Mary Little’s future husband was a prosperous mercer.
This painting belongs stylistically to a group of female portraits Gainsborough painted in Bath during the early 1760s. As such, it evinces the transformation in his work that occurred upon his move in 1759 to that city, where, on the whole, his clients were wealthier and lived more luxuriously than his patrons from Ipswich.

[1] Woodall, 97.

Julia Marciari-Alexander

Julia Marciari-Alexander, This other Eden, paintings from the Yale Center for British Art , Yale Center for British Art, New Haven, CT, 1998, p. 96, no. 34, ND1314.3 Y36 1998 (YCBA)