Mrs Fanny Stirling
in 'Masks and Faces'

The English actress Fanny Stirling, known professionally as Mrs Stirling, is seen here as as the eighteenth-century Irish actress Peg Woffington in Masks and Faces, a play by Charles Reade and Tom Taylor that was first performed in 1852.

One of Queen Victoria’s carte-de-visite albums in the royal collection at Windsor contains a variant pose showing a seated Mrs Stirling holding the painting seen here on the left, with her face poking through the hole in the canvas.