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Art Sleuths Discovered a Lost and ‘Enormously Important’ Portrait of an Elite Indian Woman by This Pioneering Scottish Painter

Katherine Read was one of the most fashionable portrait creators in London before she moved to India. She found success portraying women and children

Christian Thorsberg | Daily Correspondent

July 27, 2026 1:33 p.m.

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An 18th-century portrait delivered wrapped in a sleeping bag to BBC television program “Fake or Fortune” is actually a painting by one of Scotland’s most famous female artists, experts announced last week.

They determined that the gold-framed portrait—which features a young Indian woman wearing several pearl necklaces and an emerald pendant—was the work of Katherine Read, whose formal training in art was unusual for a woman of her day.

“What a wonderful result,” Philip Mould, an art dealer and the show’s co-host, tells BBC News’ Steven McIntosh. “I’m sure we’re going to see more works by this pioneering woman artist in India coming out of the woodwork.”

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A post shared by Philip Mould & Company (@philip_mould_gallery)

The artwork, the earliest known portrait of an Indian person painted by a female European artist, is valued at some $130,000. The show’s “art detectives” received it from Mary-Louise Wedderburn, a retired accountant who inherited the painting from her uncle two decades ago. Wedderburn said she had inklings that the portrait may have been painted by Read, who she thinks was a distant relative.

“It’s just so important to me that it’s by Katherine Read, because of the family connection, but also because of who she was,” Wedderburn said on the program. “The more that we find out about Katherine Read, the more I think she was just a wonderful woman, she was just super.”

One of 13 children, Read was born near Dundee, Scotland, in 1723. Because she was a woman she was not allowed to study life drawing of nude subjects. In 1745 she traveled to Paris to study crayon painting, then in 1751 moved on to Rome, where she created portraits of Italian aristocrats and British travelers.

“You’ll see I’ll top it with the best of them,” Read, confident in her work, wrote in a letter to her brother, the Scotsman’s Alison Campsie reported in 2021.

In 1753, Read moved again, this time to London, to set up a studio. She quickly “established a reputation as one of the most fashionable portrait painters in crayon, which she sustained for over 20 years,” according to Washington, D.C.’s National Portrait Gallery, which owns several mezzotint prints of Read’s works.Read created more than 300 portraits, mostly of women and children.

She spent the last years of her life in India, where, the newest discovery suggests, she continued painting women.

In their efforts to authenticate the painting, researchers drew from multiple sources of evidence. They found that the portrait’s pigments, modeling and brushstroke patterns were similar to known works by Read, including a portrait of her niece Helena Beatson, which served as a key comparison. They also looked through letters and wills that helped illuminate Read’s work and life in India, according to RadioTimes’ Molly Moss.

All signs, the experts concluded, pointed to the painting as authentic. They also hypothesized that the painting’s subject was likely posed in present-day Chennai, then known as Madras, and was part of the local Mughal ruling class. Though her name is not known, she was likely the wife of an Indian prince.

“That is extremely unusual because most of the other portraits of Indian ladies are a companion, or sometimes a wife, of a European,” art historian Charles Greig said in the episode, according to BBC News. “But I can’t think of another portrait of an Indian lady of this period that is actually part of a royal court rather than a European’s household. That makes it enormously important.”

Christian Thorsberg | Read More

Christian Thorsberg is an environmental writer and photographer from Chicago. His work, which often centers on freshwater issues, climate change and subsistence, has appeared in Circle of Blue, Sierra magazine, Discover magazine and Alaska Sporting Journal.