C. Charlie, Portrait of Madame Valière, ca. 1780–85

Chicago:

Blythe Sobol, “C. Charlie, Portrait of Madame Valière, ca. 1780–85,” catalogue entry in Aimee Marcereau DeGalan, Blythe Sobol, and Maggie Keenan, The Starr Collection of Portrait Miniatures, 1500–1850: The Collections of the Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art, vol. 1, ed. Aimee Marcereau DeGalan (Kansas City, MO: Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art, 2024), https://doi.org/10.37764/8322.5.2214.

MLA:

Sobol, Blythe. “C. Charlie, Portrait of Madame Valière, ca. 1780–85,” catalogue entry. Aimee Marcereau DeGalan, Blythe Sobol, and Maggie Keenan. The Starr Collection of Portrait Miniatures, 1500–1850: The Collections of the Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art, edited by Aimee Marcereau DeGalan, vol. 1, Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art, 2024. doi: 10.37764/8322.5.2214.

See the artist’s biography in volume 4.

This understated portrait of a woman is the only known miniature by a mysterious artist known only as “C. Charlie.”¹ Our ability to discover anything else about this portrait has been further hampered by its exposure to water at some point, creating a tide line, moisture spots, and abrasion to the paint surface throughout.²

Madame Valière, as the sitter is identified in the inscription,³ gazes forthrightly out at the viewer, her arms crossed firmly in front of her before a background in a muted gray dappled style, following gradations of shadow across the picture plane. The artist depicts her in three-quarters profile, unsparingly delineating the hooked curve of her rather prominent nose. A peachy pink pigment adds a distinctive brightening accent to the ear, the area under the grayish brows, the inner and outer corners of the eyes and eyelids, and the contours of the nose, lips, chin, and neck. A single white fleck to the left of each pupil adds dimension. The artist’s evocative rendering of the sitter’s large, deep brown eyes and quirked, upturned mouth suggests a measure of self-possession, wry wit, and intelligence with minimal strokes of the brush.

The sitter’s hair—or perhaps her wig, considering its volume—appears to be heavily powdered to a grayish-brown hue, and she wears a voluminous sheer veil that extends behind her back of the type that was worn by married women in some regions of Eastern Europe and provincial France.⁴ She is soberly but finely dressed in a shot-silk gown of blue and purple, rendered in semisheer washes of pigment, with a lace fichu adorning the neckline for both modesty and fashion. Regardless of his or her identity, Charlie was not an artist inclined toward flattery, yet this miniature remains an attractively honest portrayal of a clever woman in middle age.

Notes

1. Nathalie Lemoine-Bouchard, Les Peintres en Miniature 1650–1850 (Paris: Les éditions de l’Amateur, 2008), 152. Lemoine-Bouchard describes Charlie as an “artist who worked in ‘pointillé’’ and who gives presence to the face of his model.” We are grateful to Bernd Pappe for his advice on this miniature and the artist’s possible background during a visit to the Nelson-Atkins from July 24–26, 2023. Notes in NAMA curatorial files.

2. These findings were noted by consulting conservator Carol Aiken during surveys and treatment of the collection from 2018 to 2019. Notes in NAMA curatorial files.

3. It is also possible that some enterprising dealer sought to capitalize off the name of a celebrated royal mistress by adding a variation on the name of Louise de la Vallière to the inscription.

4. Pappe, 2023, notes in NAMA curatorial files.

Mrs. Helen Carew (d. 1951), by October 15, 1951 [1];

Purchased from her posthumous sale, Objects of Art and Vertu: Fine Gold Watches and Boxes and Miniatures, Christie, Manson, and Woods, London, October 15, 1951, lot 16, as Madame Valière, by Leggatt Brothers, London, probably on behalf of Mr. John W. (1905–2000) and Mrs. Martha Jane (1906–2011) Starr, Kansas City, MO, 1951–August 7, 1958 [2];

Their gift to The Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art, Kansas City, MO, 1958.

Notes

[1] “Mrs. Carew gave from the Farquhar Matheson Collection twenty-five snuff-boxes in gold, enamel, and other materials, and a group of objects of silversmiths’ work,” according to Victoria and Albert Museum, Review of the Principal Acquisitions During the Year (London: H.M. Stationary Office, 1920), 57. Basil Long mentions a Carew in an article on Richard Crosse: “The largest existing collections of miniatures by Richard Crosse are probably those belonging to the Rev. W. E. Crosse Cross and Mr. Charles Robert Sydenham Carew. The latter inherited his collection from the late Rev. Robert Baker Carew, of Collipriest, near Tiverton. . . . The remainder of Mr. Charles Carew’s collection, including numerous miniatures by Crosse and a full-length portrait of a Miss Crosse, is at Collipriest.” Basil Long, “Richard Crosse, Miniaturist and Portrait-Painter,” The Volume of the Walpole Society 17 (1928): 65. Charles Robert Sydenham Carew (1853–1939) married Muriel Mary, who died in 1939. None of his siblings were named Helen or married a Helen, and none died in 1950 or 1951. Another Helen Carew (née Wyllie) was close friends with author Oscar Wilde, but died in 1928 at the age of 72. With thanks to Maggie Keenan for her research on Helen Carew.

[2] The lot is described in the sales catalogue as “Portrait of Madame Valière, by C. Charlé [sic], wearing mauve scarf and long gauze veil in her hair, oval, 2 1/4 in. high.” Another miniature in the same lot is also in the Nelson-Atkins collection (Workshop of André Léon Larue, called Mansion, Portrait of General Jean Victor Marie Moreau, F58-60/3). An annotated catalogue for this sale is located at the University of Missouri-Kansas City, Miller Nichols Library. The annotations are most likely by Mr. or Mrs. Starr. Lot 16 is circled twice, in blue pen and pencil. Archival research has shown that Leggatt Brothers served as purchasing agents for the Starrs. See correspondence between Betty Hogg and Martha Jane Starr, May 15 and June 3, 1950, Nelson-Atkins curatorial files.

Ross E. Taggart, ed., Handbook of the Collections in the William Rockhill Nelson Gallery of Art and Mary Atkins Museum of Fine Arts, 4th ed. (Kansas City, MO: William Rockhill Nelson Gallery of Art and Mary Atkins Museum of Fine Arts, 1959), 264, as Mme. Valière.

Ross E. Taggart, The Starr Collection of Miniatures in the William Rockhill Nelson Gallery (Kansas City, MO: Nelson Gallery-Atkins Museum, 1971), no. 245, p. 80, (repro.), as Madame Valière.

Nathalie Lemoine-Bouchard, Les Peintres en Miniature 1650–1850 (Paris: Les éditions de l’Amateur, 2008), 152.