Elizabeth Iliffe, Countess of Egremont, 1797 (oil on canvas)

Elizabeth Iliffe, Countess of Egremont (1769-1822). A three-quarter-length portrait, seated, profile right with her hands on an urn. She is wearing a blue silk skirt, white sleeves, brown sash and a blue and white scarf on her head. In about 1784 the fifteen-year-old Elizabeth Iliffe, or Ilive, became his principal mistress and the unofficial chatelaine of Petworth. She was the daughter of a Westminster schoolmaster, and bore Egremont seven children before their marriage in 1801. Mrs Wyndham, as she was known before her marriage, ‘took great delight in painting’, both as an artist and as a painter. The diarist Joseph Farington noted in 1798 that she planned to see the great Orléans collection of pictures then on exhibition in London following its purchase by a syndicate of English noblemen. She commissioned two paintings by William Blake (nos.427 and 454; both North Gallery), and was also an amateur scientist, who set up “a private laboratory at Petworth.