Ramsay Richard Reinagle's later career was permanently overshadowed by a genuine scandal: in 1848 he submitted to the Royal Academy exhibition, as his own work, a picture he had in fact bought at a broker's shop from a young and then-unknown artist, J.W. Yarnold, making only slight alterations before passing it off under his own name. The episode cost him his Academy membership and stands as an unusually well-documented case of outright fraud within the institution's history, a fact worth noting alongside his genuine achievements as a painter.
Born in 1775, the eldest son of the animal and sporting painter Philip Reinagle, also represented in John Mitchell Fine Paintings' collection, Ramsay Richard trained under his father, whose style in portraiture, landscape and animal subjects he followed closely, and began exhibiting at the Royal Academy as early as 1788, while still a teenager. He travelled to Italy, studying in Rome by 1796, and later visited Holland specifically to study the Dutch masters, continuing a family tradition of close engagement with seventeenth-century Netherlandish painting that his father had also pursued through direct copying. Reinagle became a member of the Society of Painters in Water Colours in 1806, serving as its treasurer the following year and as its president from 1808 to 1812, and during this period sent some sixty-seven watercolours to the Society's exhibitions, chiefly Italian views and scenes of the English Lake District, while also showing portraits and landscapes in oil at the Royal Academy, where he became an Associate in 1814 and a full Academician in 1823. He was, by his own contemporaries' account, a skilled copyist of the old masters, reportedly much employed by a picture dealer for restoring and quietly "improving" paintings, an activity that in retrospect sits uncomfortably close to the fraud that would eventually end his Academy career.
The portrait of Elizabeth Freeman held by John Mitchell Fine Paintings represents Reinagle working in the more conventional and legitimate portrait practice for which, alongside his landscape work, he built his considerable early reputation, before the 1848 episode brought his standing within the Royal Academy to an abrupt and permanent end.