This is a portrait of Catherine and Elizabeth Wyndham, the two daughters of Tory leader Sir William Wyndham (c.1688–1740) and his first wife Catherine Seymour (died 1731). The date inscribed on the portrait is 1727, when the girls would have been in their early to mid teens. This picture is a typical example of an early 18th- century English portrait depicting landed gentry. Shown in an English landscape, almost certainly intended to represent the family’s country estate, the sitters are dressed as miniature adults. Catherine’s gesture of plucking roses for her sister to collect in her lap can be understood as a visual reference to ‘Gather ye rosebuds while ye may’. This is the opening line of the popular poem and song To the Virgins, to Make Much of Time, written by the English poet Robert Herrick (1591–1674), which encourages the reader to ‘seize the day’. In 1734, seven years after this portrait was painted, Catherine died young and unmarried. In 1749 her younger sister Elizabeth married British Whig statesman and future Prime Minister George Grenville (1712–1770), by whom she had seven children. Her eldest son was George Nugent-Temple-Grenville, first Marquess of Buckingham, who inherited the estate of Stowe in Buckinghamshire (where this portrait once hung). Her fifth child was Prime Minister William Wyndham Grenville (1759–1834) and one of her granddaughters, Catherine Glynne (1812–1900), married another Prime Minister, William Ewart Gladstone (1809–1898). Elizabeth herself died in Buckinghamshire on 5 December 1769.
