Posed bolt upright in a billowing satin gown, Hannah Wentworth Atkinson is almost a mannequin for the display of opulent textiles. As the sister of the first royal governor of New Hampshire and the wife of that colony's chief justice and richest man, she was as close to an aristocrat as any person in colonial America. She and her husband found a suitable portrait painter in Joseph Blackburn, who was probably born and trained in England, and was thus familiar with fashionable tastes.
