Jo Manning on Sophia Catherine Musters
Some final thoughts on Sir Joshua Reynolds’ favorite female sitters…and on Sir Joshua himself… as we come to the last of Reynolds’ sitters who intrigued me, Sophia Catherine Musters, whose pose as Hebe, cupbearer to the gods, was exhibited by the Royal Academy two years later, in 1782. It’s a rather more of Reynolds’ conventional society lady portraits than Lady Worsley’s, with milady as goddess/demi-goddess, garbed in diaphanous gossamer sheers and with the Olympian breeze blowing the fine wispy curls of her classical hairstyle, but there’s a story behind it that led the curators of the Reynolds exhibit at the Tate Britain (Joshua Reynolds: The Creation of Celebrity), to place Mrs. Musters alongside the much more notorious Lady Worsley and not with her sisters the Aristocrats, into the room that held the Painted Women, the room graced so beautifully by the likes of Kitty Fisher, Nelly O’Brien, and Fanny Abington, whom I consider to be Sir Joshua’s favorite sitters. Was Sophia Cath