John Donaldson, Portrait of a Woman, ca. 1786–90

Chicago:

Aimee Marcereau DeGalan, “John Donaldson, Portrait of a Woman, ca. 1786–90,” 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. 2, ed. Aimee Marcereau DeGalan (Kansas City: The Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art, 2024), https://doi.org/10.37764/8322.5.1358.

MLA:

Marcereau DeGalan, Aimee. “John Donaldson, Portrait of a Woman, ca. 1786–90,” 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. 2, Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art, 2024. doi: 10.37764/8322.5.1358.

See the artist’s biography in volume 4.

Although the identity of this woman is unknown, her softly colored visage and large brown eyes present a window into her soul. The Scottish-born artist John Donaldson positions her near the picture plane with her disorderly, frizzled, natural curls extending nearly to the edges of the ivory support. Her relaxed hair corresponds to her relatively unstructured white cotton chemise gown with its open, frilled collar, a style made popular in England by Georgiana, Duchess of Devonshire, in the mid-1780s. Donaldson would have been aware of these fashions raging across England, having established his portrait painting practice there in the 1760s. He was also intimately familiar with trends in beauty and the developing cult of sensibility, publishing a book on the topic entitled The Elements of Beauty: Also, Reflections on the Harmony and Sensibility of Reason in 1780, which appeared in a second edition in 1786.¹

One concept he discussed was how exterior features correspond to an interior state of being. This became especially relevant in mid-1700s England with the development of the cult of sensibility, or emotion, which came to associate sensibility with refined feeling, discrimination, and taste, as well as an intense sensitivity to the suffering of others.² These abilities intersected with evolving dialogues on beauty, such as Donaldson’s, in visibly tangible ways.

In his book, Donaldson writes about colors corresponding to feelings, noting that “mellow and gentle tones of colour associate with, and dispose to, the gentle and delicate of internal feelings.”³ His soft palette of whites and ivories—and the pink highlights he utilized to render the blush of his sitter’s cheek and lips—appears again in subtle contrast between her ivory pearls and pink hair ornament, and between her mauve sash and white gown. This delicate palette corresponds to those principles expressed in his book and may indeed be meant to reflect his sitter’s gentle interior sensibility. However, of all the shapes, features, and colors that Donaldson associates with beauty, he felt that “the eye is the principle feature” and “the most remarkable part of the human body.”⁴ It is this feature of Donaldson’s sitter—large, limpid pools of soft brown—that confront our gaze and lay her soul bare.

Notes

1. John Donaldson, The Elements of Beauty: Also, Reflections on the Harmony of Sensibility and Reason (Edinburgh: Charles Elliot; London: T. Cadell, 1780).

2. The development of the cult of sensibility was influenced by British moral philosophers such as the Earl of Shaftesbury and Francis Hutcheson, among others. There is a surfeit of publications on the topic. See in particular Paul Goring, The Rhetoric of Sensibility in Eighteenth-Century Culture (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004). For a brief overview, see also Daniel Wickberg, “What Is the History of Sensibilities? On Cultural Histories, Old and New,” The American Historical Review 112, no. 3 (June 2007): 661–84.

3. Donaldson, Elements of Beauty, 14.

4. Donaldson, Elements of Beauty, 54–55.

Mr. John W. (1905–2000) and Mrs. Martha Jane (1906–2011) Starr, Kansas City, MO, by 1958;

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

The Starr Foundation Collection of Miniatures, The Royal Ontario Museum, Toronto, December 8, 1972–January 14, 1973, no cat., no. 50, as Unknown Lady.

Ross E. Taggart, The Starr Collection of Miniatures in the William Rockhill Nelson Gallery (Kansas City, MO: Nelson Gallery-Atkins Museum, 1971), no. 50, p. 21, (repro.), as Unknown Lady.