Maria Reynolds
1768-1828
A New York floozie who brought down the career of
Alexander Hamilton.
A note on the illustration: No one knows what she actually looked like. A Google Image search will come back mostly with pictures from the musical Hamilton. That's no help because Lin-Manuel
Miranda deliberately cast actors who did not look at all like the
characters they played, if you know what I mean.
Scattered through the search results I saw multiple 18th Century ladies
misidentified as Maria Reynolds. Apparently Google will spot the search terms
somewhere on a page, and grab any nearby picture of a female.
Eventually a high school student will uncritically copy and paste the
picture into their history homework as "Maria Reynolds". The next Google search to come along will see two
pages where that picture is labelled "Maria Reynolds", and the ID solidifies.
These are some of the pictures I've seen identified as Mrs. Reynolds:
Actually, this is Maria Anne
Fitzherbert (née Smythe, previously Weld, 1756-1837), mistress of
George IV of the United Kingdom, portrait painting in oil on canvas by
Sir Joshua Reynolds, circa
1788.
Actually, this is Mrs Richard Crofts painted by Sir Joshua Reynolds, 1775
Google found this
lone portrait of a woman on a webpage about the
Reynolds Pamphlet, so Google grabbed it and called it Mrs.
Reynolds. The original caption, however, was "Eliza Hamilton stood by
her
husband even after news of
his affair tarnished her own reputation." Labelling Eliza's picture
Mrs. Reynolds is cold, like calling out the wrong name during sex.
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