This painting is a superb example of the portraiture of George Romney, who succeeded Reynolds and Gainsborough to become the most fashionable portrait painter in late Georgian London. Executed between the years 1787 and 1789, the work depicts the Welsh-born Frances (née Puleston) Cooke (1765-1818) in highly fashionable attire.

Frances was the only child of Philip Puleston of Hafod-y-wern, near Wrexham, North Wales, and Mary, née Davies, of Llanerch and Gwysaney. In 1786 she married the Yorkshire country gentleman Bryan Cooke (1756-1821), an aspiring officer turned local politician who served as Member of Parliament for Malton between 1798 and 1821. This painting was undoubtedly commissioned by Cooke on the event of their marriage, as indeed he sat for Romney for his own portrait a few years earlier between 1780 and 1781.1 The artist's sitter's book reveals that Frances sat for the artist in his studio in Cavendish Square, London, ten t.mes s in total.2 These sittings were split between April and May 1787 and May and June 1789, with the intervening recess because of Mrs. Cooke's first pregnancy. Among the details of her later life are notes that she was a patron of the Society for the Education of the Poor in Doncaster, South Yorkshire. She and her husband would have five sons and daughters, of whom their heir Philip Davies-Cooke (1793-1854) would inherit Gwysaney Hall in North Wales.

Typical of the artist's portraiture, free from the often fussy and encumbered visual references employed by his rival Sir Joshua Reynolds, Romney's portrait of Mrs. Cooke focuses on the essentials required for a successful and beautiful likeness. Alex Kidson has suggested that the sitter probably would have "cherry picked" elements of the design inspired by examples on display in Romney's studio. Notably, the composition and feeling of this portrait is not far from depictions of Romney's most famous muse, Lady Emma Hamilton (1765-1815). Many of the core elements, including the tilted black hat, pose, and drapery, mirror the celebrated Emma in a Black Hat (fig. 1), a portrait painted in the mid 1780s, just prior to this work.3 The painter's bold brushwork too, which enhances the sculptural quality of the white drapery, is in this instance beautifully preserved behind a layer of thick yellowed varnish.

Curiously, a reproduction of this painting came to fame in Stanley Kubrick's Academy Award nominated 1962 Hollywood adaptation of Vladimir Nabokov's Lolita. In the climatic final scene, where actor James Mason's character Humbert Humbert confronts the abductor Clare Quilty, the assailant pursues his foe around his mansion with a gun. In an attempt to hide himself, Quilty uses the painting as a screen. This disguise fails, as Humbert sees his shadow, shoots through the canvas, and thus kills his foe. Among the fatalities is (a reproduction of) Romney's portrait, which is left peppered by bullet holes.

1 Kidson 2015, pp. 144-145, cat. nos. 279, 279a, and 280 (all untraced).
2 Kidson 2015, vol. III, p. 856.
3 Boston, Museum of Replica Handbags s.