Elizabeth Gunning was the second daughter of Col. John Gunning of Castle Coote, County Roscommon, Ireland and his wife, the Hon. Bridget Bourke, daughter of the 6th Viscount Mayo. Born in Hemingford Grey, Huntingdonshire, she was taken to Ireland at the age of three and lived there until 1750 when, with her elder sister Maria, she was brought back to England and presented in London society. Thanks to their beauty and unsophisticated charm the Gunning sisters ‘became the rage and the subject of conversation at every fashionable rout’. Elizabeth became the wife of James, 6th Duke of Hamilton in an extraordinary ceremony, performed with the ring of a bed-curtain at half past midnight on St. Valentine’s Day 1752 after a party at Bedford House at which the Duke had lost £1200 at cards. The Duke of Hamilton, by whom she had three children, died on 17 January 1758 and early in the following year she married John Campbell, Marquis of Lorne, who in 1771 succeeded as 5th Duke of Argyll. She was created Baroness Hamilton of Hambledon in her own right in 1776.   Lady of the Bedchamber to Queen Charlotte from 1761 to 1784, she was appointed Mistress of the Robes in 1778 and died on 20 December 1790. She was one of the most portrayed women in Britain during the period 1750-70.                        

Katherine Read was born in Dundee. She first studied in Paris with the pastellist Maurice-Quentin de La Tour and while in Rome (1751-53), was taught oil painting by Louis-Gabriel Blanchet. Read arrived in London in 1754 and quickly established herself as a fashionable portrait painter and in 1761 gained the patronage of Queen Charlotte. She exhibited in London at the Society of Artists, (1760-72), the Free Society of Artists (1761-68) and the Royal Academy (1773-76). She died on board ship returning from visiting her brother in India.