PLATE VII.—MRS. ROBINSON—"Perdita"
(At the Wallace Collection)
This portrait of the beautiful actress is one of Gainsborough's finest masterpieces. The lightness, dexterity, and transparency of the pigment is almost unrivalled, not only in this artist's work, but in any picture of the eighteenth century. It hangs in the Wallace Collection at Hertford House; a smaller sketch of the same subject is at Windsor Castle.
Gainsborough left two daughters, whose portraits he painted several times. The elder one, Margaret, did not marry; while the younger, Mary, was secretly wedded in 1780 to her father's friend, Johann Christian Fischer, the hautboy player. This marriage caused Gainsborough much trouble; he foresaw that the musician's irritability and eccentric behaviour on many occasions could not conduce to the happiness of his daughter; however, to quote his own letter to his sister, Mrs. Gibbon, "As it was too late for me to alter anything without being the cause of total unhappiness on both sides, my consent, which was a mere compliment to affect to ask, I needs must give." The father's foreboding was only too fully justified; the union turned out very unhappy from the first, and within a year or so husband and wife separated. Both sisters were mentally deficient, and their aberrations increased with age to the point of total derangement. Mary, soon after her marriage, became subject to wild hallucinations, "perhaps the most reasonable" (as Fulcher puts it) being that the Prince of Wales was pursuing her with his love. After her mother's death she went to live with her sister, whose mental condition was even worse than her own; they would receive no visitors who did not belong to the nobility, so that many who wished to gain admittance to the house were obliged to assume titles which they did not possess. Margaret died about 1824, and Mary a year or two later; before her death she insisted on presenting to the king the portrait of Fischer, painted by her father at Bath about forty years before; this portrait is now in the Royal Collection.