Not that he didn't have competition she posed for all three of the leading portrait artists of the day - the slightly cheaper George Romney, then Gainsborough, then the most prestigious of all, Sir Joshua Reynolds, president of the Royal Academy. Uninhibited about the eroticism of his culture, and at the same time someone with a heart, he was her perfect myth-maker. Thomas Gainsborough, the artist who loved women, was the man to paint Perdita. And yet by the time George commissioned Gainsborough to paint her portrait, the affair was over - he had a new fling, and Perdita had lost everything: her acting career was wrecked, she was massively in debt and soon to be bounced between a string of high-profile lovers. When the love affair between Perdita and the Prince of Wales became public in 1780, she was the talk of the town - satirised in prints, gossiped about in Vauxhall Gardens and St James's Park she quit the stage, threw away a promising career for her new role as royal mistress. But it was her beauty, her way of carrying herself - she always had "a sort of dignified air", she said - that got her a string of male friends eager to help, libertines such as the politician Charles James Fox and playwright and manager of the Drury Lane Theatre, Richard Brinsley Sheridan. Her performing skills were noticed by the actor and theatre manager David Garrick. Her first book of poems was published in 1775. Within months, Thomas was imprisoned for debt and Mary had to fend for herself with three talents - for poetry, acting and sex. Raised in seedy circumstances, she married one Thomas Robinson when she was 15. Mary Robinson - nicknamed Perdita after her performance in The Winter's Tale at Drury Lane Theatre - was one of those self-invented individuals who made 18th-century Britain such an effervescent, commercial, cynical, corrupt, celebrity-conscious, shallow, competitive, socially mobile, dangerous place - a mirror of ourselves.
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