Andrew Plimer, Portrait of a Woman, ca. 1800

Chicago:

Aimee Marcereau DeGalan, “Andrew Plimer, Portrait of a Woman, ca. 1800,” 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. 3, ed. Aimee Marcereau DeGalan (Kansas City, MO: Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art, 2024), https://doi.org/10.37764/8322.5.1470.

MLA:

Marcereau DeGalan, Aimee. “Andrew Plimer, Portrait of a Woman, ca. 1800,” 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. 3, Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art, 2024. doi: 10.37764/8322.5.1470.

See the artist’s biography in volume 4.

Set against a densely hatched sky background of light blue and gray, this unknown, brooding beauty embodies the epitome of Plimer’s mature style. Her oversized eyes, which biographer George Williamson connected to Plimer’s wife, became an attribute the artist imbued to most of his sitters, including those outside his family circle.¹ The sitter wears her natural hair short, with longer curled pieces framing her face, a style possibly inspired by the shorn hair of Marie Antoinette when she appeared for her execution. Similarly, the sitter’s white cotton muslin wrap dress also takes its inspiration from the former French queen. Intended to refer to ancient Greece and Rome, this type of white dress appears on many of Plimer’s sitters during this period. The portrait’s color palette is minimal, in varying tones of whites, browns, blues, and gray. As was typical of Plimer’s miniatures realized after 1789, it is unsigned.

In writing about Plimer’s portraits, Williamson acknowledged that “his women were never all of them so lovely as he represents them.”² Indeed, certain facial features in Plimer’s female portraits—including the wide eyes, elegant nose, elongated neck, and rounded cheeks seen here—appear across his portrait painting practice.³ These qualities may have appealed to New York financier John Pierpont Morgan, who owned this miniature before the Starr Family acquired it. At the time, Morgan had the largest collection of works by Andrew Plimer in the country.⁴ Although not a scholar, Morgan had a good eye and “a lifelong, sensuous taste for beautiful things.”⁵ One can see how this miniature would have appealed to his sensibilities.

Notes

1. George C. Williamson, Andrew and Nathaniel Plimer, Miniature Painters: Their Lives and Their Works (London: G. Bell and Sons, 1903), 61.

2. Williamson, Andrew and Nathaniel Plimer, 85.

3. This sitter bears some resemblance to the sitter in Plimer’s portrait of Elizabeth Ellis, daughter of John Ellis, Esq., of Hurlingham, Middlesex, and Jamaica, from the collection of Lord Hothfield; see George C. Williamson, Portrait Miniatures (London: The Studio, 1910), pl. 25. Similarly, the Nelson-Atkins sitter also looks like Harriet Forbes, whose portrait miniature was formerly in the J. Pierpont Morgan collection; see Williamson, Andrew and Nathaniel Plimer, 40–41.

4. Morgan knew a great deal about portrait miniatures and had assembled one of the finest private collections of the modern era, with about eight hundred examples ranging from the fifteenth to the nineteenth century by most of the important artists in the field. For more on him as a collector, see Jean Strouse, “J. Pierpont Morgan: Financier and Collector,” Metropolitan Museum of Art Bulletin 57, no. 3 (winter 2000): 25.

5. Jean Strouse, “J. P. Morgan’s Last Romance,” New York Review of Books (April 22, 1999): https://www.nybooks.com/articles/1999/04/22/jp-morgans-last-romance.

John Pierpont Morgan (1837–1913), New York [1];

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.

Notes

[1] A label on case verso reads, “J.P. Morgan Collection / NYC”. The present miniature was not listed in Morgan’s posthumous sale, “Catalogue of the Famous Collection of Miniatures of the British and Foreign Schools: the Property of J. Pierpont Morgan, Esq,” Christie, Manson, and Woods, London, June 24, 1935, so it may have been sold prior to this 1935 sale.

Andrew Plimer, Elizabeth, Daughter of John Ellis, Esq., of Hurlingham, Middlesex, and Jamaica, from the collection of Lord Hothfield. Illustrated in George C. Williamson, Portrait Miniatures (London: The Studio Ltd., 1910), pl. XXV.

Ross E. Taggart, The Starr Collection of Miniatures in the William Rockhill Nelson Gallery (Kansas City, MO: Nelson Gallery-Atkins Museum, 1971), no. 170, p. 58, (repro.), as Unknown Lady.