The portrait depicts Elizabeth Ludlow, daughter of a London wine merchant, John Ludlow. On 9 May 1728 she married Philip Hawkins II (? 1700–1738), the owner of Trewithen.¹ The portrait is the pendant to a portrait of Philip (TN33), also by John Vanderbank. Both portraits are incorporated into plaster frames on the wall either side of the fireplace in the Dining Room. It appears that Thomas Hawkins (1724–1766), who inherited the property from his uncle Philip, dictated that these family portraits, along with another portrait thought to be of Philip II (TN32), should be displayed in the new Dining Room designed by Robert Taylor in the early 1760s.

Vanderbank worked as a portrait painter and illustrator. He was one of the first students at Sir Godfrey Kneller’s academy and in 1720, with Louis Cheron, he set up a short-lived new academy described as ‘The Academy for the Improvement of Painters and Sculptors by drawing from the Naked’.² According to the engraver George Vertue, while Vanderbank possessed ‘superior merit in drawing, greatness of pencilling, spirit and composition’, his untimely death in his mid-forties was occasioned by ‘his irregular living (of women and wine)’.³ And although he was clearly talented, he depended heavily on stock poses and the drapery painting of Joseph van Acken.

This portrait of Elizabeth Ludlow in a grand classical setting shows a slight stiffness in the handling of the face, but the composition is elegant and the drapery is superb. The pose of the upper body and arms is similar to that given to Catherine Collingwood (d. 1761), Lady (Robert) Throckmorton (fig. 1), and the pose combined with an interaction with a dog also occurs in the double portrait of Anne and Mary Tonson (fig. 2). The inclusion of lapdogs in portraits of women, and usually larger dogs alongside those of men, was an established trope in portraiture well before the eighteenth century. A dog traditionally symbolised fidelity – to a spouse or country – but also no doubt represented a pet of sentimental value to the sitter, as it seems to be in this portrait.