This large double portrait depicts the sisters Lady Catherine and Lady Jane Brydges, the daughters of John Brydges, the Marquess of Carnarvon (1703-1727). They are seated on a stone ledge within in an arcadian park landscape with a fountain on one side and sumptuous silk drapery to the other. They hold a garland of flowers by a blue silk ribbon around a lamb seated between them, a representation of romantic pastoral simplicity and childhood innocence which was popular in English painting at the time.

Oil on canvas in a period 'Lely' panel frame with attached title plates.

Canvas: 116 x 150cm (45 1/2 x 59in)

Frame size: 137 x 172cm (54 x 67 1/2in)

Catherine (1725-1807) and Jane (1727-1776) were the daughters of John Brydges, Marquess of Carnarvon, Viscount Wilton and heir apparent to the Duke of Chandos and Catherine Tollemarche, daughter of Lionel, 3rd Earl of Dysart. Their eldest daughter, Catherine, shown wearing the russet gown with a blue mantel, married firstly William Berkeley Lyon and secondly in 1753, Edwyn Francis Stanhope of Stanwell House, Middlesex, with whom she had two children, Edwyn Francis in 1754 and Catherine in 1755. Catherine Stanhope married Sir Hungerford Hoskyns, 6th Baronet of Harewood Park, Herefordshire in 1774.

The younger daughter Jane Brydges, shown wearing a yellow silk gown,  married her cousin, James Brydges of Pinner, but had no children. 

James Maubert was born in Dublin in 1666, the son of a French Huguenot.
 He was the pupil of Gaspar Smitz, the Dutch born artist who specialised in portraits, flowers and fruits, who came to England shortly after the Restoration in 1660 and lived in Dublin from the mid 1660's until his death in 1668. 
The diarist George Vertue, who knew Maubert and who relied on him as a source for certain anecdotes concerning artists that appear in his Notebooks, states ‘Mr Maubert had his first instruction in drawing and painting from him in Dublin’.

Maubert worked for the Bathurst family, the Herberts and painted portraits of the Duchess of Bolton. As in the present portrait, two of these also demonstrate Maubert’s preference for including decorative flowers in his compositions, often using honeysuckle which was said to have been one of his favourite flowers. 

Like many artists of the period, Godfrey Kneller and Michael Dahl had a marked influence on his work, acknowledged at the time by Vertue in his notebooks. He noted that Maubert was 'a good Ingenious civil man ... he not only paints from the Life but is very skillful in painting of fruits & flowers. his draperys are well dispos'd & natural'