The Honorable Mary Graham by Thomas Gainsborough Exhibited Royal Academy 1777
In 1780 The Honourable Mary Graham left her native Perthshire and sailed to Lisbon. She
was to remain on the Iberian Peninsular for more than a year, one of numerous British
tubercular tourists seeking the benefits of a warm climate.
Acclaimed as a great beauty at the courts of St Petersburg and Paris, Mary Graham had
become a renowned icon of beauty in Georgian London after her portrait by Gainsborough
was exhibited at the Royal Academy in 1777. Her portrait and her life create a defining
moment in the eighteenth century. Her admirers included the Duchess of Devonshire, Robert
Burns, Mary Wollstonecraft and Thomas Gainsborough.
Illness forced her to flee northern Europe but her adventures and exploits in Lisbon, Oporto,
Vigo and eventually Madrid where she travelled in the summer of 1781, were reported
back in Scotland and England . Recording exotic items of dress she saw abroad, she learned
Portuguese and indulged her love of art in Madrid where she was the first British woman
to admire a work by Goya in the Royal Academy . While her image by Gainsborough
changed the trajectory of British female portraiture and looks forward to romantic portraits by
Lawrence, Raeburn and Millais, her management of her disease, charitable work and artistic
inclinations make her a heroine in tune with much 18th and 19th - century feminism.
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