Sophia Southwell was the daughter of Samuel and Mary Campbell of Mount Campbell, County Leitrim. In 1765, the year preceding this portrait, Sophia married Edward Southwell, who later became 20^th Baron de Clifford in 1776. After Edward’s death in 1777, Sophia was made Governess to Princess Charlotte of Wales, the daughter of the future King George IV and Caroline of Brunswick.

Four appointments with the present sitter were recorded in Reynolds’ account book in March and April 1966, and two payments in the artist’s Ledger were noted in March and May of the same year, totalling £36.15s (Mannings, op. cit.). The sitter appears to have maintained contact with Reynolds after this portrait; he visited her at Spring Gardens, Westminster, in 1779, had appointments with her in 1782 and 1784 and painted her again in 1786, the portrait now untraced (Mannings, op. cit., p. 421, no. 1655).

The present work was originally painted as an oval and extended to a rectangle at an unknown date after 1899, when Graves and Cronin published an illustration of the painting in oval-form (op. cit., p. 544). When the corners were made up the feigned, sculpted oval and trompe l’oeil curtain were extended. At the time of Mannings’ catalogue in 2000 the feigned oval and curtain had been painted over to suggest an atmospheric sky, overpaint that was subsequently removed prior to the 2014 sale.