The fourteen-year-old boy in this portrait was recently identified as Marcus Richard Fitzroy Thomas. He sat for Reynolds on July 10, 1782—the day after Charles Stanhope, third Earl of Harrington, had a sitting. Stanhope had recently returned from a military post in Jamaica, and he likely brought Thomas—who may have been attached to his regiment or enslaved on a plantation owned by Stanhope’s stepfather-in-law—back to Britain as an attendant. Thomas was later baptized when he was nineteen, on the same day as Stanhope’s newborn child. Much remains to be uncovered about Thomas’s life, though parish registers reveal that he married and moved to Sussex, where his son John Henry was born in 1794. Thomas later returned to London, where in 1816 he died just thirteen days after he was admitted to a workhouse for the poor. He is buried in Camden Town Cemetery, now St. Martin’s Gardens.

The zebra in this painting was owned by Queen Charlotte and was the sole survivor of a pair brought back from Southern Africa in 1762 by Sir Thomas Adams, the commanding officer of HMS Terpsichore. Though it wasn’t the first zebra on British shores—Prince Frederick had kept zebras at Kew in the 1740s—it was certainly the most visible. Charlotte’s zebra lived in a paddock near Buckingham House, where it was made available to a public with a thirst for exotic animals, spawning several, sometimes bawdy, tributes to “the Queen’s she-ass.” Beyond satire and public curiosity, the zebra was the subject of great scientific interest, as evidenced by Stubbs’s meticulously painted portrait, which may have been made with the assistance of the anatomists William and John Hunter. Stubbs’s incongruous setting (more forest glade than tended paddock) creates an air of melancholy, suggesting both the wonder and the costs of the Enlightenment.

J. M. W. Turner made his second Continental tour in 1817 in the aftermath of the Napoleonic Wars and passed through Dordrecht on his way home. This view, one of Turner’s masterpieces, was painted after his return to London in December 1817 and was exhibited at the Royal Academy in April 1818. The Swan, a packet boat from Rotterdam, is traveling down the river Meuse toward Dordrecht and is being provisioned by passing boats while it is becalmed. A vision of peaceful serenity, the picture contrasted with Turner’s other exhibit that year, a view of the bloody battlefield of Waterloo by moonlight. In Dort, Turner was emulating the celebrated Dutch painter Aelbert Cuyp (1620–1691), whose work was avidly collected by British connoisseurs. The painting’s extraordinary luminosity and brightness of color dazzled the critics, one of whom claimed it was “one of the most magnificent pictures ever exhibited.”

Gwen John’s conversion to Catholicism in 1913 led her to discover the writings of the Carmelite nun Thérèse of Lisieux, who had died in 1897 at just twenty-four years old and was canonized in 1925. Thérèse had described a “little way” to holiness, through the humble acceptance of small sufferings and sacrifices in the monotony of daily life rather than through heroic acts of faith. This painting of a young woman, though larger than usual, is typical of John’s mature work, in which she relied on only a few models to produce paintings of solitary young women. They are rarely named and are typically posed in quiet contemplation, sometimes, as here, praying the Rosary. These images reflect a belief in the importance of embracing one’s insignificance and the superiority of prayer and contemplation over worldly action.

Joanna Wells studied painting in London and Paris. She belonged to the circle of the Pre-Raphaelites and exhibited to acclaim for the first time in 1851, when John Ruskin warmly admired her work. Fanny Eaton was a biracial model of Jamaican heritage who posed for Wells and other Victorian artists such as Albert Moore, Frederick Sandys, and Dante Gabriel Rossetti. This small study was made in the last year of Wells’s life as she prepared a large canvas of Zenobia, the ancient queen of Syria. She died in childbirth before she could complete it.