Mrs. Richard Brinsley Sheridan by Gainsborough, Thomas

This is Mrs. Richard Brinsley Sheridan, painted by Thomas Gainsborough between 1785 and 1787. She was Elizabeth Ann Linley, a famous soprano who gave up her career when she married the playwright Richard Brinsley Sheridan. She sat for this portrait in her early thirties, and would die of tuberculosis just seven years later, at thirty-eight. The painting now hangs in the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C.

But the canvas arrived in America under circumstances Gainsborough never could have imagined. In 1936 it was purchased in London for the American collector Andrew Mellon by the art dealer Joseph Duveen. To avoid paying the stiff US import duties on foreign art, the painting was cut from its stretcher, rolled up without a frame, and packed in a steamer trunk. A woman traveling as an ordinary tourist carried it through New York customs as personal luggage. No one looked twice.

The painting was later relined, mounted, and gifted to the National Gallery in 1937 as part of Andrew Mellon's founding collection. What we see today is a survivor, not only of time but of a genuinely brazen smuggling operation. A customs officer in 1936 could have unraveled it right then and there.

When you look closely, the brushwork on the pink silk dress is almost impossibly light, feathery, and rapid. Gainsborough painted fast. The loose, informal hair and the faraway gaze were a deliberate choice, signaling feeling over formality. The sky behind her is unsettled, a kind of psychological weather. Knowing what she was facing and what the painting went through, that quiet expression lands even harder.