[Lady Cecilia Johnston]

According to the excellent write-up on the Love Bites exhibition site, Mrs Johnston (nee West) was born into a conventional upper-class family in 1730. In 1762, she married Lieutenant-General James Johnston, and lived for the next ten years on Menorca, an island off the coast of Spain, where he was stationed. Their house was the social center for the small British community residing there, and perhaps it was her early experience as a big fish in a small pond that led her to maintain an inflated view of her husband's and her own importance even after they returned to England in 1774. As a result, some of her contemporaries remembered as proud, vain, and somewhat absurd. But not so Horace Walpole, who describes her in a letter to Mary Berry on 29 September 1794 as "gentle, humane, and agreeable."

This is one of at least eight prints by Gillray in which Lady Cecilia Johnston appears. And so far as I can tell, Gillray was the first artist to single her out for caricature. Since there was no current scandal about the lady and the portrait remains resolutely ironic rather than specifically satiric, I am inclined to assume that, at least intially, Gillray was drawn to her by her singular and prominent profile which he has here captured memorably.

Sources and Reading

• Commentary from the British Museum on [Lady Cecilia Johnston]
• Lady Cecilia Johnston from the Love Bites Exhibition

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