Adriana Verelst was born in Vienna in 1680 but moved with her family to London at the age of three. Her father was the celebrated Dutch Golden Age artist Harman Verelst, who was part of the Verelst dynasty of painters, and her mother was a Venetian called Cecilia Fend. Until recently, Adriana was known to scholarship under the name Maria, a mistake that can be traced to printed material from 1818. The researcher Peter Hancox has recently uncovered contemporary documentation to show that Harman Verelst’s daughter was actually named Adriana, and not Maria, correcting a misunderstanding which lasted nearly two centuries. Of the few surviving signed works by Adriana, which like the present example all date to the 1720s, they are signed Mdme or Mrs Verelst without indicating a Christian name. Her patronage drew from the highest levels of aristocracy to middle ranking landowners, with some of the best examples of her work found in the collections of the Dukes of Marlborough at Blenheim Palace, Earl Spencer at Althorp, the Dukes of Buccleuch at Drumlanrig Castle and the Earls of Haddington at Mellerstain. Adriana Verelst was also the first female artist in Britain to consistently paint full-length portraits, a scale which the best of artists throughout time had always found most daunting.

This newly discovered and intimate bust-length portrait is a rare addition to Verelst’s little- surviving oeuvre. This format in particular displays the artist’s skill at capturing the charming feminine quality of the sitter, aided by the harmony of tone and soft modulation of colour in the flesh and drapery. In this instance Margaret Nelson looks out confidently to the viewer wearing a simple rich blue velvet gown. Verelst has depicted Mrs Nelson within a painted cartouche, an artistic decoration reminiscent of the portraiture of Mary Beale in the previous generation. In looking at comparative works, the same distinctive face pattern is found in a portrait of Hannah, 8th Countess of Exeter, at Burghley House, although the present version is far more sensitive in handling and intimate in scale.

This portrait of Margaret Nelson is also most reminiscent of an exciting, recently rediscovered portrait in the Brighton & Hove Museum of an unknown sitter wearing a red dress, a work which, until recently, was misattributed to her male contemporary Sir Godfrey Kneller. Verelst's two portraits of King Charles II's great- granddaughter Lady Charlotte Scott (1697-1747), recently reidentified in the Duke of Buccleuch's collection, also demonstrate that she would on occasion scale up bust-length portraits into much more elaborate three-quarter lengths. Her ability to work on various scales, including with oil on copper (recorded in texts, yet still currently untraced), is a testament to her remarkable versatility.

Born in 1694, Margaret Bracewell hailed from the prosperous Lancashire gentry. She married John Nelson of Foulridge, near Colne, on the 30 January 1713 and soon after had a son, Richard Nelson (1714 -1766). Although little is known of Margaret and John’s day to day lives, it is likely that this portrait was undertaken on a trip to London where Mrs Nelson sat to Adriana. Indeed, it would seem highly likely that the Nelson family, like much of the Gentry across England, would have travelled to London for the season throughout the eighteenth century.