Mrs Margaret Desenfans by After Sir Joshua Reynolds

This portrait is a twentieth-century copy by the Syrian-born artist Moussa Ayoub (c.1873-1955), of an original by the British portraitist, Joshua Reynolds (1723-92), painted in 1757. Margaret Morris (1731-1814) appears here as a young woman, before her marriage to Noel Desenfans (1741-1807). When they wed in 1776, Morris brought with her the money that kickstarted her husband's art dealing business. Her wealth was tied to the flourishing industry around her hometown of Swansea in south Wales. Her father and brother had made their money in the Welsh copper-manufacturing business, and they produced and sold goods to merchants, including those trading in Africa, the West and East Indies, and to the East India Company. Morris was the only one of Dulwich Picture Gallery's founders to live to see the Gallery built. After the death of her husband, and later her good friend Francis Bourgeois (1753-1811), she provided the money that allowed architect John Soane (1753-1837) to complete his grand design.

Born in Syria, Ayoub studied in Paris, before settling in Britain. He appears to have worked as one of a team of copyists working under the artist Samuel Luke Fildes (1843-1927). He assisted Fildes with supplying the demand for portrait copies of the royal family that were sent all round the world and, beyond the Royal Collection, his works feature in numerous collections in the UK and the USA. This copy of Morris’s portrait was commissioned by Dulwich College in 1930, three years after Fildes’s death, when the original painting was with the art dealership, Agnew’s.