The Right Honorable Lady Mary Radcliffe (1732-98), Wife of Francis Eyre, Esq. (1755): Art, History and Details

The Right Honorable Lady Mary Radcliffe (1732-98), Wife of Francis Eyre, Esq. (1755) is in the Cleveland Museum of Art collection. The museum's creator attribution is Francis Cotes (British, 1726–1770).

The work and its context

The museum's open-access catalogue describes the work:

A founding member of the Royal Academy and one of the leading fashionable portrait painters of his generation, Francis Cotes was a pioneer of pastel painting in England. Here, in her marriage portrait, the young Lady Mary Radcliffe is regal in a Turkish-inspired, peacock blue mantle decorated with gold and trimmed with ermine. Pearls and feathers adorn her hair and a décolleté scarlet bodice reveals an expanse of porcelain skin.

Object facts

• Title: The Right Honorable Lady Mary Radcliffe (1732-98), Wife of Francis Eyre, Esq.
• Date: 1755
• Creator attribution: Francis Cotes (British, 1726–1770)
• Culture: England, 18th century
• Type: Drawing
• Technique: pastel on laid paper lined with canvas
• Dimensions: Image: 60.7 x 45.7 cm (23 7/8 x 18 in.)
• Collection: DR - British
• Department: Drawings
• Accession number: 1946.463

A detail from the museum

Francis Cotes described his pastel works as "decorative in a very high degree in apartments that are not too large; for having their surface dry, they partake in appearance of the effect of Fresco, and by candle light are luminous and beautiful beyond all other pictures."

Collection credit

Gift of Edward B. Greene

Further reading listed by the museum

• Francis, Henry S. "Three Eighteenth-Century Pastel Portraits." Bulletin of the Cleveland Museum of Art 34, no. 9 (1947): 213-36.
• Johnson, Edward Mead. Francis Cotes: Complete Edition with a Critical Essay and a Catalogue. Oxford: Phaidon, 1976.
• The Cleveland Museum of Art Catalogue of Paintings, Part 3: European Paintings of the 16th, 17th, and 18th Centuries. Cleveland, OH: The Cleveland Museum of Art, 1982.

View the collection record

See the museum's photographs and full catalogue entry. Catalogue text is reproduced from the Cleveland Museum of Art's open-access data, with HTML formatting removed. This object and its supplied image are designated CC0.