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Mr Reynolds and Mr Ramsay can scarce be rival, their manners are so different. The former is bold and has a kind of tempestuous colouring…the latter is all delicacy. Mr Reynolds seldom succeeds in women, Mr Ramsay is formed to paint them. Horace Walpole, 17591 Allan Ramsay's portrait of a young woman leaning pensively on a parapet and looking wistfully out at the viewer is one of his most striking. Combining a delicacy of costume and pose with a realistic treatment of the sitter's features, Ramsay imparts to her an arrestingly bold yet quiet beauty. In capturing the very idiosyncrasies of the young woman's face, he conveys the immediacy of her quiet charm-her square jaw, her cleft chin, and especially her thin lips, the upper of which droops down at its center as if to indicate a slight overbite. Her large eyes openly entice and beguile; they are, as a Frenchman once said of English women's eyes, "not so sparkling as melting."2 Ramsay's exploitation of the evocative powers of his sitters' facial particularities is at the heart of his immense success as a portraitist. Like his close friend and colleague William Hogarth, he sought to use the individual physiognomies of his subjects to evince character. Unlike that of Hogarth, however, his realism was heavily tempered by his affinities for the soft, delicate lines, surfaces and tones of the French Rococo. Artists like François Boucher, in his portraits of Madame de Pompadour, or Jean-Marc Nattier, in his of Louis XV's daughters, used the delicate, fine and luxurious fabrics and textures of their sitters' clothing and hair adornments to evoke the sensuality of the women they were painting. Similarly, Ramsay revels in the transformation of paint into lace, silk, and flowers; every precious detail of the young woman's clothing reflects her beauty. Not only showing his French sensibilities, this portrait also hints at the artist's growing awareness of and impending rivalry with Joshua Reynolds, who in 1759 had used this same pose in his portrait of Miss Kitty Fisher (National Trust, Petworth). Despite its references to other contemporary works, this image remains intensely personal. Some have suggested that the sitter is the painter's daughter Amelia, who was born in 1755; if so, the painting would presumably date from about 1772. The young woman's dress and hairstyle are very much in accordance with the fashions of the early 1760s, however, and the portrait closely resembles in style and format other of Ramsay's female portraits of that earlier date.

Julia Marciari-Alexander, This other Eden, paintings from the Yale Center for British Art, Yale Center for British Art, New Haven, CT, 1998, p. 94, no. 33, ND1314.3 Y36 1998 (YCBA)