Cocktails with a Curator: Reynolds’s "Selina, Lady Skipwith"

In this week’s episode of Cocktails with a Curator, Curator Aimee Ng bids farewell to the series with a discussion of Joshua Reynolds’s Selina, Lady Skipwith, currently on view on the fourth floor of Frick Madison. Seen here with a nosegay tucked into her neck kerchief and a pallid countenance (made more so by the application of poisonous lead makeup), Selina was thirty-five years old when she sat for this portrait and had recently married the politician and baronet Thomas Skipwith despite misgivings about the union. Her husband died a short time later, but Selina lived to be eighty, chronicling her later years in journals. This week’s complementary (and admittedly over-the-top) cocktail, the Asparagus Fizz, was inspired by an 1828 entry in Selina’s journals in which she notes that she has tasted asparagus for the first time.

This episode of Cocktails with a Curator is underwritten by First Republic Bank.

Cocktail Recipe

Asparagus Fizz
1 stalk of asparagus, muddled
1 1/2 oz gin
1/2 oz fresh lemon juice
Stir with ice and strain; top with champagne
Garnish with an asparagus spear

Audiences under 21 are encouraged to join with a non-alcoholic drink.

Mocktail

1 stalk of asparagus, muddled
1/2 oz fresh lemon juice
1/2 oz simple syrup
Top with ginger beer