In a decisive scene in Edith Wharton’s 1905 novel The House of Mirth, the luckless protagonist, Lily Bart, is cajoled into taking part in a tableau vivant. This form of Edwardian entertainment required participants to dress up as a work of art: to become a “living picture”. Lily shrewdly opts for “a type so her own that she could embody the person represented without ceasing to be herself”.
Lily’s (or, rather, Wharton’s) choice – Joshua Reynolds’ 1776 Mrs Richard Bennett Lloyd – now hangs in a shaded corridor of Waddesdon Manor, the neo-Renaissance chateau in Buckinghamshire that was once the weekend residence of Ferdinand de Rothschild. It depicts a young woman clad in flowing, classical dress, etching the name “Lloyd” into a tree. Its subject is Joanna Bennett Lloyd – my great-great-great-great-great-grandmother.
I discovered this connection in the summer of 2019, when I was living with my grandmother in High Wycombe while interning in Whitehall. I spent a lot of time that summer with my mother’s family – particularly her elder sister (my aunt) Kate, with whom I share the same bookish sensibility. One sunny Saturday afternoon in my grandmother’s back garden, she told me what she knew of Joanna’s story.
I am related to Joanna on my mother’s side, through my late Grandad George. My aunt first learned about Joanna as a teenager in the 1980s, on a trip to visit family in the US. My grandfather’s cousin – her name was Hilda, but everyone called her Plum – had moved from the UK to Pennsylvania some years earlier. In her home proudly hung a mezzotint of Reynolds’ portrait. Plum often pointed to it, telling my aunt: “We’re related to her.”
Her words stuck with Kate. Decades later, in the early 2000s, she resolved to go hunting for the mysterious woman in the Reynolds portrait. She learned about the painting, its provenance and whereabouts, and the identity of the woman depicted. But one question remained: were we really related to her?
When my aunt told me this story, I was gripped. Together, we uncovered a direct line from Joanna’s family in the late-18th century to our 21st-century one. The more we discovered, the more extraordinary Joanna became.
Joanna Leigh was born in 1758 to a wealthy mercantile family from the Isle of Wight. She and her three sisters were heiresses to their father’s fortune and to Northcourt House, a Jacobean manor on the island.
Reynolds was commissioned to paint Joanna in 1773, when she was 14 years old, to mark her betrothal to Richard Bennett Lloyd. Lloyd, then 23, was an officer from Maryland, in America, whose family owned tobacco plantations. He was a captain in the Coldstream Guards, having purchased a commission in the British Army, as some did at the time to gain rank and social status. We do not know how Joanna and Richard met, but it was likely in London during the season – the annual period in which England’s elite would descend upon the capital for balls, dinner parties and matchmaking. Lloyd’s regiment was stationed in Westminster; my aunt likes to imagine that they noticed each other while promenading in St James’s Park. They married in 1775 at St George’s Church in Bloomsbury.
Reynolds’ painting marked a significant moment in Joanna’s life: she was preparing for marriage and her departure from England. I like to imagine that he was moved by this coming-of-age moment. He chose to paint Joanna in an enclosed, lush woodland; a gentle brook runs past her, and warm sunlight peeks into the glade behind her. The setting is inarguably English. Her pose, inscribing her married name into a tree, is a facsimile of a well-known moment in Shakespeare’s As You Like It, in which Orlando etches the name of his beloved Rosalind on to trunks in the Forest of Arden. Reynolds depicts Joanna carving her new name into the natural fabric of England, as if she is asking it not to forget her.
Art critics have often focused on Joanna’s pose – its suggestiveness, its playfulness – and it is true that she seems more at ease than the more guarded, stiff poses in portraits of her contemporaries. The British fashion designer Bruce Oldfield told Country Life magazine: “Compared with her contemporaries painted by Reynolds – the Ladies Waldegrave and Mary, Duchess of Richmond, for example, fine upstanding examples of the upper echelons of 18th-century British society – the twice-married Joanna [Joanna remarried after Richard Lloyd’s death in 1787] Lloyd has all the racy qualities of an ‘It’ girl.”
It is diverting to wonder whether Joanna shared her anxieties and excitement about her impending marriage with Reynolds. After all, they must have spent hours together at his studio in Leicester Square during the portrait’s composition. Was the setting her decision, or his? How much say did she have over the way she was presented? Over her dress? Sadly, Reynolds’ pocketbooks from 1774-76 (the period when the painting was likely completed), which might offer answers, are missing.
Why did Richard choose Reynolds to paint his young bride? As Waddesdon’s senior curator Juliet Carey told me on a recent visit, the choice of painter is as significant as the composition of a painting. To choose Reynolds was to choose a more classically influenced style of portraiture, designed by the artist to stand the test of time. Thomas Gainsborough, Reynolds’ arch-rival, instead depicted the fleeting domesticities of everyday life.
Reynolds was appointed the official royal artist by King George III (although the New Statesman’s esteemed art critic, Michael Prodger, informs me that privately, the king preferred Gainsborough). Perhaps this association influenced Lloyd’s choice: he took great pride in his commission to the British Army.
Reynolds himself was clearly pleased with the portrait. It was exhibited at the 1776 Summer Exhibition at the Royal Academy, alongside perhaps his most well-known painting, the Portrait of Omai.
Bruce Oldfield was right to describe Joanna as an It girl. As a newly married couple, Joanna and Richard spent much of their time between London and Paris, mixing in the same circles as the American founding fathers John Adams, Benjamin Franklin and George Washington. Joanna captivated those who met her with her charm and her looks: she was the star of this new American social milieu.
Richard was forced to give up his place in the British Army shortly after his marriage to Joanna because of growing tensions between England and America. By 1778, he and Joanna were living in Paris among many other wealthy Americans. France played a crucial role in the American Revolution, and many Americans made a home in Paris. One was Franklin, who became the first American ambassador to France, and a friend to the Lloyds. (One letter, from Richard to Franklin, indicates that, despite his fondness for Britain, he was sympathetic to the cause of American Independence.) Joanna and her husband were invited to a 4 July dinner hosted by Franklin and Adams in Paris. The Lloyds returned to London at the end of that year, taking a house on Hanover Square.
By the early 1780s, the Lloyds were living in Maryland and closely involved in the social circle that revolved around Washington and his wife, Martha. A letter from 1782 from Baron von Closen – an aide to the French general Count Rochambeau – describes Joanna as the most beautiful woman in North America. According to Von Closen, Joanna spoke fluent Italian and French, and had “enchanting” taste in clothes. His letter makes it clear that the couple’s decision to live in Paris was Joanna’s: Von Closen tells his interlocutor that Richard “fell in love with her and only obtained her on the condition that he would spend two years with her in France”.
The letter concludes resoundingly: “En un mot, elle est réputée la beauté de l’Amerique” (“In a word, she is the reputed beauty of America”.) Another letter in Waddesdon Manor’s collection, passed between two sisters living in Maryland, reveals that by 1784, Joanna was “more followed and admired than ever she was”. It describes a memorable outfit: “a gauze apron spangled with gold and black velvet stars and looped with wreaths of flowers”.
Adams refers to Joanna as a “handsome English lady” in his diaries, and Washington wrote to her to express his “high respect and admiration” for her. That Joanna made such an impression in a country that was not her own speaks of her magnetism and strength of her character. I think I would have liked her.
By the time of Richard’s death in 1787, Joanna had returned to England with her children. Richard struggled with alcoholism, and lived beyond his means (perhaps the Reynolds portrait was a sign of his taste for opulence). A letter from David Humphreys, an American soldier and diplomat to Washington, written a year before his death, reports: “Mrs Lloyd I have not seen, she is in the country, her husband I saw one evening quite intoxicated, since which I am told he is in confinement for debt.”
After Joanna’s death in 1814, her portrait was passed into the care of her eldest daughter, Amelia, who married an English clergyman, John Giffard Ward. They married at St James’s, on Piccadilly, opposite the Royal Academy, where Joanna’s portrait was first unveiled. In 1869, the portrait was sold to the art dealers Agnews at auction, and then later to the Rothschilds, who hung it at Waddesdon Manor, where it remains to this day.
Though my aunt and I have spent hours poring over Reynolds’ portrait of Joanna, or catching glimpses of her in the words of her contemporaries, she still evades us: among others’ impressions of her life, her own experience of it is lost.
I think of Joanna often, whenever I pass the Royal Academy on Piccadilly, or the blue plaque that marks the location of Reynolds’ studio, sandwiched between an All Bar One and a McDonald’s on Leicester Square. I daydream about her life in 18th-century London, so different to mine, and wonder what of her there is in me.
[See more: The first and last New Journalist]
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This article appears in the 14 May 2025 issue of the New Statesman, Why George Osborne still runs Britain