In this week’s episode of “Cocktails with a Curator,” Curator Aimee Ng bids farewell to the series with a discussion of Joshua Reynolds’s “Selina, Lady Skipwith,” currently on view on the fourth floor of Frick Madison. Seen here with a nosegay tucked into her neck kerchief and a pallid countenance (made more so by the application of poisonous lead makeup), Selina was thirty-five years old when she sat for this portrait and had recently married the politician and baronet Thomas Skipwith despite misgivings about the union. Her husband died a short time later, but Selina lived to be eighty, chronicling her later years in journals. This week’s complementary (and admittedly over-the-top) cocktail, the Asparagus Fizz, was inspired by an 1828 entry in Selina’s journals in which she notes that she has tasted asparagus for the first time.

To view this painting in detail, please visit our website: https://www.frick.org/reynoldskipwith