Joshua REYNOLDS
English 1723-1792
Miss Susanna Gale
1763-64
oil on canvas
210.0 x 118.8 cm
Felton Bequest 1934
158-4

Susanna Gale (1749-1823), daughter of a Jamaican plantation owner, was about fourteen when Reynolds painted this portrait. By the 1760s Reynolds usually painted his female sitters in classical drapery, but the young Miss Gale is dressed in contemporary clothes, although she is placed like a sculpture on a stone plinth in front of a classical column.

The painting was trimmed on the right edge in the eighteenth century, the result of seawater damage after a ship captained by Susanna's husband ran aground on the northwest coast of America.