Kitty Fisher (1741-67) (oil on canvas) 1759

Kitty Fisher was a friend of Reynolds’s, and had a reputation as a courtesan, but on the 9th of November 1766 she married John Norris, MP, of Hempsted Manor, Benenden, Kent, who was MP for Rye 1762–1774. She died at Bath four months later, at the age of about twenty-six, ‘a victim to cosmetics’ (or small pox), and was buried “in her best dress” on 23 Mar 1767. By 1760 a pamphlet addressed to her by ‘Simon Trusty’ claimed that ‘Your Lovers are the Great Ones of the Earth, and your Admirers are the Mighty; they never approach you but, like Jove, in a shower of Gold.’ Her voracity was notorious and when Casanova met her in London in 1764, covered in diamonds and waiting to go to a ball, he was told that she had once clapped a £20 note into a bread-and-butter sandwich and consumed it.