Lady Elizabeth Foster, 1785 (oil on canvas)

The entry in Angelica Kauffman’s diary, on the day this portrait was painted, reads: “Naples Oct 1785 for Lady Foster, her portrait, half-length figure...sitting in a boscage; in the distance, the Isola d’Ischia - the head was painted at Naples and the remainder finished after at Rome.” The sitter was the second daughter of Frederick Hervey, 4th Earl of Bristol and Bishop of Derry (1730-1803), and Elizabeth Davers (1730-1800). She married as her first husband, in 1776, John Thomas Foster of Dunleer, Louth, M.P. for Enniskillen, who died in 1796. In 1809, she married William Cavendish, 5th Duke of Devonshire (1748-1811), three years after the death of his first wife, Georgiana, with whom she had lived as his mistress in a ménage à trois since 1782. After his death and the end of the Napoleonic Wars, she retired to Rome, where she maintained a salon, supported excavations, and was drawn by Lawrence.