[2] For nearly seventy-five years, she worked in worsted embroidery, producing a collection of over 100 pictures that specialised in full size copies of old masters.

[3] Her exhibition in Leicester Square, London, was the first art show to be illuminated by gaslight and innovative theatrical displays with red, silver and gold curtaining and one where it looked like peeping into a cottage window.

[4] The exhibition consisted of copies of paintings after such masters as Carlo Dolci, Guido, Ruisdael, Opie, Morland, Gainsborough and Reynolds.

[3] So successful was Linwood in these annual shows attracting 40,000 customers a year, similar to Madame Tussauds,[4] that she was able to commission John Hoppner (1758–1810) to paint her portrait.

By this time Hoppner was principal painter to the Prince of Wales (later George IV) and the most important portraitist in England.Ladies Monthly Review spoke of its "variety and graduation of tints cannot possibly exceeds in effort by the pencil.

[citation needed] Charles Dickens mentions her in "A Plated Article", his description of a visit to Staffordshire, to be found in Reprinted Pieces: "Shade of Miss Linwood, erst of Leicester Square, London, thou art welcome here, and thy retreat is fitly chosen!

I myself was one of the last visitors to that awful storehouse of thy life's work, where an anchorite old man and woman took my shilling with a solemn wonder, and conducting me to a gloomy sepulchre of needlework dropping to pieces with dust and age and shrouded in twilight at high noon, left me there, chilled, frightened and alone.

[7] A legal dispute regarding the payment for renovations became a decades long battle, and eventually landed in The House of Lords in 1837.

In 1845, during her annual visit to her Exhibition in London, Mary Linwood, by then regarded as the most celebrated needlewoman of her age, caught the flu and died.