Lady Caroline Howard by Reynolds, Joshua, Sir

In 1778, Sir Joshua Reynolds painted Lady Caroline Howard at perhaps eight years old. She is the daughter of Frederick Howard, 5th Earl of Carlisle, and Reynolds shows her dressed in aristocratic finery, seated on the grass of an idealized English countryside. The painting hangs in the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C.

Look at the contrast between her two hands. The right hand reaches outward, fingers extended toward a low bush of pink roses. The left hand rests still and settled in the folds of her white silk skirt. Reynolds builds the whole emotional weight of the portrait across that distance. The reaching hand is the only animation in the frame; the settled hand is the counterweight.

Roses in eighteenth-century portraiture carried a specific freight. They meant beauty, love, and the briefness of both. Placing them just beyond a child's grasp turns a fashionable portrait into a vanitas. Reynolds was England's leading portraitist and the first president of the Royal Academy; he knew exactly what he was doing with that bush.

The painting rewards slow looking. The crumpled white satin of her dress is a direct homage to Van Dyck, and the dark cape Reynolds draped over her shoulders creates the canvas's dominant contrast. But the real charge is in the hands: one reaching toward a beauty that fades, one already still.