Half length, unframed. As received the stretcher bears a paper label in a late-18th-century hand identifying the sitter as 'Elizabeth / Wife of Edmund Maskelyne / of Purton Wilts / Daughter of John Booth & / Eliz[abe]th daughter & heiress of / Edmund Progers Herbert / Mother of Dr Maskelyne / & Lady Clive'.

Edmund Maskelyne (1698-1744) was a civil servant, as one of the clerks to the Duke of Newcastle, Secretary of State for the Southern Department and, in effect, defence minister at the time of Edmund's death. His wife Elizabeth (nee Booth), the sitter here, was the only child of John Booth of Chester, a distant cousin of Edmund's. The couple had four children, all born in Kensington, London: William in 1725, Edmund in 1728, Nevil, the future 5th Astronomer Royal, in 1732, and Margaret in 1735. In about 1800 Nevil described himself as the 'last male heir' of the Maskelyne family of Purton, Wiltshire, suggesting none of the brothers had surviving sons. The Maskelynes had strong connections with the East India Company and by the 1740s Nevil's brother Edmund was stationed in Madras, where he became a close friend of Robert Clive, later Baron Clive of Plassey ('Clive of India', 1725-74). Margaret Maskelyne (see ZBA5102) was raised by relatives in Wiltshire after her mother's death in the winter of 1748/9 and went to join Edmund in Madras in 1751, where Clive was captivated by her: they married there on 18 February 1753. The Clives had four children of whom Edward, the eldest and subsequently first Earl of Powis (1754-1839) was governor of Madras from 1797. Margaret herself had interests in astronomy and when Clive was in Bengal in 1764-67 spent most of her time close to her brother Nevil - who was appointed Astronomer Royal at Greenwich in February 1765 - in a rented house at Westcombe. After Clive's relatively early death, she survived him for over forty years, mainly living in Shropshire where she died on 28 December 1817. [PvdM 8/12]