This sensual and contemplative portrait by Sir Joshua Reynolds, the first president of the Royal Academy of Arts, is the most celebrated surviving likeness of Nancy Parsons, one of eighteenth-century Britain's most famous political courtesans. Parsons is depicted in a highly fashionable Turkish masquerade dress, a lavish cost.mes that is a beautiful and sophisticated evocation of the decadence befitting a consort of Dukes, Earls, and Viscounts.

The most striking feature of this portrait is Parsons's exuberant turban and Turkish gown. Reynolds stands at a crossroads in popular and artistic taste. The enthusiasm for Turquerie, which visually evoked stereotypes of Eastern exoticism, was fashionable in Britain from the 1720s onward.¹ Its appearance in portraiture has often been linked to Masquerade dress, cost.mes s worn during the era's decadent entertainments and festivities.² Contemporary French painters often depicted women in such dress as mistresses in Turkish hareems.³ However, in the British context, Reynolds and his contemporaries painted many respectable married women and aristocrats in this mode.
By the t.mes Reynolds completed Parsons's portrait in the late 1760s he had already been experimenting with Turquerie in his paintings for over a decade. A clear comparison with his Portrait of The Hon. Mrs. John Barrington (fig. 1), painted a decade earlier, demonstrates how far the artist had progressed in this particular genre in terms of sophistication and depth. Turkish dress, however, reoccurs in portraits of Parsons. George Willison (1741-1797) painted her in circa 1771 wearing such a cost.mes for a likeness now in the Yale Center for British Art (fig. 2).

The visual cues in this portrait also look backward in t.mes stylistically and offer evidence of Reynolds's fascination with the Old Masters. The dramatic lighting and loosely painted golden orange drapery reveals, in particular, Reynolds's devotion to seventeenth-century Dutch artists. Rembrandt's paintings, in particular, often displayed a preoccupation with Eastern themes and dress.⁴ The work also takes inspiration from seventeenth-century Italian artists, including the introspective female sibyls and muses by Domenichino and Guercino, often painted wearing luxurious clothing in contemplative poses.⁵ This eclectic mixture of sources of inspirations makes this an exemplary example of portraiture in the "Grand Manner."

Anne [Nancy] Parsons was said to have been the daughter of a Bond Street tailor and began her professional life as an Opera figurante on the London stage. Mirroring the life of the royal mistress Nell Gwyn (1650-1687) a century earlier, such roles often attracted the attention of wealthy suitors offering money in exchange for female companionship. Although the details of her early life are unclear, Parsons is said to have married a Mr. Haughton (or Horton), a West Indies slave trader who is believed to have taken her to Jamaica. The union did not last, as she returned to London soon afterward and by the 1760s had become involved with several high-ranking government officials including William Petty (1745-1777), 2nd Earl of Shelburne.

In 1763, Parsons began an affair with prominent politician Augustus Henry FitzRoy (1735-1811), 3rd Duke of Grafton, with whom she attended public events at Ascot and the Opera in the presence of royalty. As his consort, she often became embroiled in political life, especially after FitzRoy became Prime Minister in 1768, their relationship was often lampooned in popular poems at the t.mes . Much to the surprise of her paramour, she also embarked on an affair with John Frederick Sackville (1745-1799), 3rd Duke of Dorset, an enthusiastic patron of the arts.

It was at this t.mes that Parsons likely sat to Reynolds. Dated by David Mannings to 1767 or 1769, this timing is significant due to Sackville's considerable patronage of Reynolds at this very moment.⁶ Indeed, the artist's pocketbooks show that Sackville and Parsons (referred to as "Horton" in the artist’s records) sat for him multiple t.mes s in 1769, resulting in this portrait and Sackville's full-length painting at Knole.

In 1776, Parsons married Charles Maynard, 2nd Viscount Maynard (1751-1824), who was about ten years her junior. The two married that September and then traveled to the continent, where in 1784 they encountered the young Francis Russell (1765-1802), 5th Duke of Bedford, with whom they entered into a ménage à trois until about 1787. Parsons and Maynard then separated, and she spent the remainder of her life devoting herself to acts of charity and piety. She was eventually buried outside Paris after her death in 1814 or 1815.

A NOTE ON THE PROVENANCE
This painting descended directly from the sitter through the Maynard family to Frances (née Maynard) Greville (1861-1938), 5th Countess of Warwick.⁷ Known as "Daisy" to her friends, the Countess was a famous socialite turned radical socialist who for a number of years during the 1880s to 1890s was the favored mistress of Edward, Prince of Wales and later King Edward VII (1841-1910). She presided over the first major dispersal of artworks from the Maynard collects ions at Easton Lodge, Essex, and the Greville collects ions at Warwick Castle in the 1910s and 1920s. This included paintings by Rubens, Rembrandt, Van Dyck, as well as her own portrait by John Singer Sargent. The majority of these works were eventually acquired by American buyers and have since entered American museums.⁸ After passing through the hands of several dealers, the present portrait was acquired by the banker, collects or, and philanthropist Jules Semon Bache (1861-1944) from whom the Metropolitan Museum of Art acquired a significant collects ion of Old Masters in 1944.

¹ H. Williams, Turquerie: An Eighteenth-Century European Fantasy, London 2014, pp. 89-101.
² Ribeiro 1984, pp. 241-247.
³ Williams 2014, pp. 102-104.
⁴ A noteworthy Rembrandt in this mode that was in London until 1773 was Haman Recognizes his Fate, now in the State Hermitage Museum, Saint Petersburg.
⁵ London, Wallace collects ion, inv. no. P131.
⁶ For an account of Dorset's patronage of Reynolds see J. Chu, "High Art and High Stakes: The 3rd Duke of Dorset’s Gamble on Reynolds," in British Art Studies 2 (2016): https://www.britishartstudies.ac.uk/issues/issue-index/issue-2/high-art-high-stakes.
⁷ It appears that this painting survived the 1918 great fire of Easton Lodge that also claimed many historic documents relating to the estate, including inventories from the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. There were later sales of other paintings from the Maynard line at Replica Shoes 's, London, 21 November 1938 and Christie's, London, 28 May 1948.
⁸ Peter Paul Rubens, Thomas Howard Earl of Arundel (Boston, Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum); Rembrandt van Rijn, The Standard Bearer, Floris Soop (New York, Metropolitan Museum of Art); Anthony van Dyck, Margareta de Vos (New York, The Frick collects ion); John Singer Sargent, Lady Warwick and Her Son (Worcester Museum of Art).