Portrait of Julia Hasell

Edinburgh-born artist, Allan Ramsay, was a celebrated society portraitist of the mid-eighteenth century, rising to the rank of Principal Painter in Ordinary to the King, a position he occupied until his death in 1784.

The sitter was the second daughter of Sir Christopher Musgrave, 5th Baronet, of Hartley Castle, was MP for Carlisle. She was named after her mother, the daughter and heiress of Sir John Chardin, Kt (1643-1712) of Kempton Park, Middlesex, a famous traveller in India and the Middle East. Julia Musgrave married Edward Hasell of Dalemain, near Penrith.

It was almost de rigeur in the 1740s for fashionable beauties to be portrayed wearing variations of ‘Van Dyck’ costume. The dress derives from Rubens’s portrait of Helena Fourment, which was then ascribed to Van Dyck and in Sir Robert Walpole’s collection in London. Ramsay, along with his contemporaries, produced quantities of Fourment imitations, but using pretty, rococo hues in place of the dark tones of the baroque.