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Miss Hickey first sat to Reynolds on February 28, 1769, around the time he was working on a portrait of her father, Joseph Hickey, friend and legal advisor to the philosopher Edmund Burke. Only in 1773, however, did the artist seriously undertake painting this image, and she sat again five times in August of that year.
Despite its completion in or around 1773, her portrait belongs to the group of bust-length images of women Reynolds painted throughout the 1760s, and as such it stands in contrast to his grander, so-called historical or Grand Manner portraits in which sitters were shown in dress and attitudes removed from their everyday lives. He had experimented with such relaxed attitudes in his portraits from the outset of his career, especially when painting his friends and colleagues, such as Kitty Fisher or Catherine Moore, wife of the architect William Chambers. His likeness of Mary Hickey captures her individuality largely through its intimate format, her relaxed pose, and her frontal, yet non-confrontational gaze. Her manner, as she comfortably leans on a carved pedestal, is at once casual and art-historical, bringing to mind Renaissance and Baroque portraits by artists such as Titian or Frans Hals as well as examples by more contemporary Continental painters like François Boucher.
The intimacy of the portrait is heightened by Reynolds's use of light and shadow to accentuate his sitter's features; the dabs of light on the tip of her nose and lower lip, for instance, draw the viewer's eyes quickly to her smooth white cheek and rosy lips. Reynolds increases the power of Hickey's coy glance by shading her eyes with the brim of her white satin hat, a technique that again has clear art-historical precedents, including, especially, Rembrandt's 1633 portrait of his wife, Saskia (Dresden). But like Hickey's pose, her supremely fashionable hat-similar to that which Mrs. Browne wears in Wheatley's portrait of the Browne family (no. 19)-contributes to the painting's aura of immediacy. A writer in the Gentleman's Magazine in 1776 noted the alluring-if somewhat comical-aspect of such headgear:
Hats that only shew the chin
And the mouth's bewitching grin. [1]
Indeed, all of the trimmings and accessories of her outfit serve to intensify the overall painterly effect of the picture and, by extension, her beauty.
Painting as much an essay in texture as a portrait, Reynolds revels in the vigorous and nervous lines and folds of the black silk of her hooded cloak and the sinuous curves of her clasped fingers within their gray gloves. He uses the sensuality of the painted fabrics to augment the vibrancy of the white flesh against which they rest. Especially evocative are the delicate black silk string sweeping sensuously against her chest and dangling a small gold ring at her breast and the hint of white lace sleeve peeping out from under her cloak where her glove begins. As opposed to his historical portraits, this image has an emphatic presence that commands a direct response from the viewer. Nonetheless, it does project an air of atmospheric remoteness, a quality inherent in many of Reynolds's portraits, one his pupil and biographer James Northcote described as "a vagueness that gives them a visionary and romantic character, and makes them seem like dreams or vivid recollections of persons we have seen." [2] [1] Cunnington and Cunnington, 355.
[2] Shaew-Taylor, 108.

Julia Marciari-Alexander

Julia Marciari-Alexander, This other Eden, paintings from the Yale Center for British Art, Yale Center for British Art, New Haven, CT, 1998, p. 102, no. 37, ND1314.3 Y36 1998 (YCBA)