This portrait of Sarah Hutchinson is part of a pair with her husband, Peter Oliver (1955.5.3), painted the same year the loyalist couple fled Boston and emigrated to England. Oliver, the nephew of Mr. and Mrs. Andrew Oliver, was a doctor who practiced in Middleborough, Massachusetts. He and Sarah, the daughter of Massachusetts governor Thomas Hutchinson and the sister of Oliver’s Harvard roommate, fell in love in a courtship that lasted four and a half years. They were married in 1770. In 1775, the Oliver and Hutchinson families were caught in political turmoil. The young couple was driven by a mob of American patriots from their country home into Boston. Dr. Oliver and his wife left for England in 1776.