Portrait of an Actress

Portrait of Ann Cargill (born Ann Brown), a British opera diva and celebrated beauty whose life and death were a sensation in London at the close of the 18th century. In both 1779 and 1780 she was the world???s highest-paid actress and during the height of her fame she set off for India to join her latest lover. She was forced to leave India after the British Prime Minister, William Pitt the Younger, told Parliament that 'an actress should not be defiling the pure shores of India.' Her ship wrecked and sank off the Isles of Scilly on 4 March 1784. The newspaper accounts of her death and how the body had been found 'floating in her shift' with an infant at her bosom made her a tragic figure for the English pres