In 1886, Edwin Long arranged with his art dealer, William Agnew, to produce a series of twenty portraits depicting the various types of female beauty present throughout the British Empire. The growth and prosperity of the empire, while a masculine endeavor, was theorized and disseminated in feminine terms: Britannia going forth and civilizing the world. Five works in the series were allegorical depictions of England, including this representation of the primrose offering her bounty within an English wood. The model for the primrose was in fact the American heiress Jennie Jerome, who since 1874 had been married to Lord Randolph Churchill, a son of the Duke of Marlborough. Lady Randolph, as she was then known, was born in Brooklyn in 1854 and was the mother of the future prime minister Sir Winston Churchill (1874–1965), one of the last figures to fully represent the high Victorian and almost sentimental notion of the benign British Empire captured in Long’s painting. Gallery label for installation of YCBA collection, 2016