Francis Cotes (English, 1726–1770), Miss Frances Lee, 1769. Oil on canvas, 36 × 28 1/4 in. (91.44 × 71.76 cm). Milwaukee Art Museum, Gift of Mr. and Mrs. William D. Vogel. M1964.5. Photo: Larry Sanders.
Portraitist Francis Cotes was almost as renowned in 18th-century England as Sir Joshua Reynolds and Thomas Gainsborough. By the end of the 1750s, he moved from pastels to oils and by the 1760s, when this painting was completed, he was the most fashionable portrait painter in London, where he also helped establish the Royal Academy and the British Society of Artists. Cotes’s likenesses of children are among his most successful works, since they have an unaffected immediacy lacking in the more formal, decoratively detailed society portraits. Here, the delicate palette of pinks, creams, and rich green creates a shimmering and lively ensemble appropriately complimentary to the young girl playing with a handkerchief rabbit and looking calmly but measuringly out at the viewer.
Website label, 2006. Written by Laurie Winters, Curator of Earlier European Art.
