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He made a particularly careful chalk drawing of Mrs Siddons (Cleveland Museum of Art, Ohio), suggesting that he couldn‘t count on more than one sitting for the portrait. Like Reynolds’s Mrs Siddons as the Tragic Muse, Gainsborough’s portrait was painted in the hope of finding a buyer or engraver, rather than commissioned.

Gainsborough probably began his portrait of her early in 1785, shortly before her thirtieth birthday. Mrs Siddons was forever ‘on the wing’ between the theatre and her young family, for whom she was the only effective breadwinner, and she had less and less time to sit for all the painters wishing to portray her. Most of Mrs Siddons’s earlier portraits depict her in character one of the most celebrated is Reynolds’s portrait Mrs Siddons as the Tragic Muse signed and dated 1784 (now in the Huntington Art Gallery, San Marino) and exhibited that year at the Royal Academy. However, when she returned again in the winter season of 1782–3, she created a sensation, causing the theatre management to put up her salary from £5 to £20 for the next season and resulting in a ‘long and unbroken line of carriages’ rolling towards Drury Lane. Although she had acted in provincial theatres since childhood, Mrs Siddons’s first London appearance, at Drury Lane in 1775, was not a success. Aged 18, she married the actor William Siddons in 1773 and was thereafter known professionally as Mrs Siddons. Four of her brothers became actors, the most famous of whom was John Philip Kemble.

Gainsborough painted her in the winter of 1784–5, during her third London season.Īs Sarah Kemble, she was born into a theatrical family. The writer and critic William Hazlitt wrote that ‘She was Tragedy, personified.To have seen Mrs Siddons was an event in everybody’s life’. Mrs Siddons (1755–1831) was the greatest tragic actress of her time, remaining at the top of her profession for 30 years.