Mrs. Susanna Hoare and Child, c.1763/64

Susanna Cecilia Dingley (1743–1795) of Lamb Abbey, near Eltham, Kent, married Richard Hoare (d.1778) of Boreham House, Essex, a partner in Hoare’s bank, in 1762. The couple had five children, and the present picture probably depicts their eldest child, called Susanna Cecilia after her mother, who died young in 1768. In 1765 Mrs. Hoare paid 70 guineas for the picture, which was probably painted 1763–1764.

Acquired by Richard Seymour-Conway, 4th Marquess of Hertford, 1859; bequeathed to the nation by Lady Wallace, 1897.

The Wallace Collection is a national museum housing the wonderful works of art collected in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries by the first four Marquesses of Hertford and Sir Richard Wallace, the illegitimate son of the 4th Marquess. It was bequeathed to the British nation by Sir Richard's widow, Lady Wallace, in 1897. The Collection displays an array of European oil paintings from the fourteenth to the mid-nineteenth century. It is particularly strong in Dutch and Flemish paintings of the seventeenth century and in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century French paintings, though there are also outstanding works by English, Italian and Spanish artists. Among the painters represented are Titian, Rubens, Rembrandt, Hals ('The Laughing Cavalier'), Velàzquez, Poussin ('A Dance to the Music of Time'), Canaletto, Gainsborough and Lawrence. The Collection also includes an unrivalled range of works by many significant French artists of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries including works by Watteau, Boucher, Fragonard ('The Swing'), Decamps and Meissonier.

(July 16, 1723 - February 23, 1792) English Rococo Painter was the most important and influential of 18th century English painters, specialising in portraits and promoting the "Grand Style" in painting which depended on idealization of the imperfect. He was one of the founders and first President of the Royal Academy. George III appreciated his merits and knighted him in 1769.
Reynolds was born in Plympton St Maurice, Devon, on 16 July 1723, and apprenticed in 1740 to the fashionable portrait painter Thomas Hudson, with whom he remained until 1743. From 1749 to 1752, he spent over two years in Italy, mainly in Rome, where he studied the Old Masters and acquired a taste for the "Grand Style". From 1753 on, he lived and worked in London. He became a close friend of Dr Johnson, Oliver Goldsmith, Edmund Burke, Henry Thrale, David Garrick and fellow artist Angelica Kauffmann. He was one of the earliest members of the Royal Society of Arts: he encouraged that society's interest in contemporary art and, with Gainsborough, established the Royal Academy as a spin-out organisation.
Many of his works show children in various states of un-dress. It is unlikely that such an interest would escape criticism in today's world, regardless of artistic merit.

With his rival Thomas Gainsborough, he was the dominant English portraitist of the second half of the 18th century. Reynolds painted in more of an idealized fashion than his rival. Reynolds was a brilliant academic. His lectures (Discourses) on art, delivered at the Royal Academy between 1769 and 1790, are remembered for their sensitivity and perception. In one of these lectures he was of the opinion that "invention, strictly speaking, is little more than a new combination of those images which have been previously gathered and deposited in the memory." In 1789 he lost the sight of his left eye, and on 23 February 1792 he died in his house in Leicester Fields, London. He was buried in St. Paul's Cathedral.