This is the earliest portrait by Thomas Gainsborough in the Frick’s collection, probably painted while the artist was living in Ipswich, in eastern England, before he moved to more cosmopolitan centers like Bath and, eventually, London. In Ipswich, he received commissions to paint portraits of local elites like Sarah, Lady Innes—who appears to have spent the entirety of her short life in the area, leaving behind two young daughters at her death. This portrait represents a transitional style, between Gainsborough’s earliest portraits of relatively stiff, doll-life figures, and the more naturalistic portraits, with freer handling of paint, for which he would become extremely popular in the maturity of his career.