Samuel Cotes, Portrait of a Woman, 1774

Chicago:

Maggie Keenan, “Samuel Cotes, Portrait of a Woman, 1774,” 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, MO: Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art, 2024), https://doi.org/10.37764/8322.5.1346.

MLA:

Keenan, Maggie. “Samuel Cotes, Portrait of a Woman, 1774,” 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: 10.37764/8322.5.1346.

See the artist’s biography in volume 4.

The background of this miniature by Samuel Cotes—a sea of russet and turquoise, like the colors of a peacock’s feathers—softly blurs into the pale profile of the unidentified sitter’s face. Her skin is ivory, like the painting’s support,¹ and her top eyelashes are thick, exaggerated by sharply arched eyebrows above. Cotes illuminates the rest of her face with hints of lilac, particularly beneath her nose and in the curvy Cupid’s bow of her top lip, a common feature in Cotes’s work. The lack of color in the sitter’s face is balanced by the deep shades of brown in her hair, which arcs upward, reaching the height of the portrait’s locket frame.² Cotes highlights the darkest brown edges of her hair with scratches in the paint, a reductive mark-making technique called sgraffito.

Tucked in between the curls of her pinned-up hair is a gauzy violet veil. It reappears at the nape of her neck, trailing down and around her shoulder until reaching the bottom of the frame and forming a floriated shape. Cotes reverses this purple and green color composition in his Portrait of Master Grosvenor, Probably Richard Grosvenor (Fig. 1), where a green blouse is visible on the sitter’s right shoulder and a purple sash stretches across his chest. Rather than dealing with intricate white lace in the present portrait, however, Cotes tackles a heavier material, outlining his female sitter’s shoulder in a swath of gold trim, like protective armor. Cotes signed the work with his characteristic “SC” initials and a 1774 date, the same year he exhibited a single miniature of a woman, perhaps this very portrait, at the Royal Academy.³

Notes

1. It is possible that the ivory support is visible in the exposed area of her chest and lower neck.

2. Georgine de Courtais, Women’s Hats, Headdresses and Hairstyles (Mineola: Dover Publications, 1973), 78. Women’s hairstyles reached extraordinary heights during the 1770s with the help of cushions, pads, or wire supports. They often included ornamentation such as feathers, pearls, or ribbons.

3. The Exhibition of the Royal Academy (London: B. McMillan, 1774), 7. It remains uncertain whether this is the same portrait of a woman as the Nelson-Atkins miniature.

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. 44, 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. 44, p. 19, (repro.), as Unknown Lady.