Agasse begins his career in his home town of Geneva sometimes collaborating with local artists, also represented in the Collection, such as Wolfgang Adam Toepffer and Firmin Massot, but he spent most of his life in England and it is to the English period that the current work belongs. Agasse met the man who was to become his main patron, the enthusiastic horse-breeder George Pitt, future Lord Rivers, in Geneva and in 1800 with his encouragement left for England where the artist would spend the rest of his career as a fashionable painter of horses and dogs for the English gentry. The identity of the lady in this picture remains a mystery. She has been identified as Emma Powles, a fellow Swiss living in England and as Mademoiselle Cazenove, possibly a cousin of the artist, but since in the entries for 1835 and 1842 in the manuscript catalogue of his works the painter only refers to the sitter as ‘the lady on horseback’, it remains an open question. This was a popular composition for Agasse as at least three versions are known, the earliest of 1808 being in larger half-length format.