Anon. Girl in Red Cloak Entering Church

An original early 19th-century watercolour painting Girl in Red Cloak Entering Church.

An intriguing painting in fluid wash showing a girl cloaked in red entering a darkened rural church. This painting invites us irresistibly to ask who and where this cloaked girl is.

The Regency Red Cloak was the staple of winter warmth in England and also Ireland up until around the 1830s, when the style fell out of favour. The artist Diana Sperling (1791–1862) often captured scenes of red-cloaked young ladies out walking in her sketchbook, Mrs Hurst Dancing: And Other Scenes from Regency Life. The red cloak also became a symbol of the wandering gypsies, and famously, at the Battle of Fishguard in 1797, it is thought that the French troops may have mistaken local women, in their traditional tall black hats and red cloaks, for British Grenadiers when they stood on the cliffs above the British force lined up on Goodwick Sands.