Andrew Plimer, Double-Sided Portrait, Probably of a Husband and Wife, ca. 1790

Chicago:

Blythe Sobol, “Andrew Plimer, Double-Sided Portrait, Probably of a Husband and Wife, ca. 1790,” 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: Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art, 2024), https://doi.org/10.37764/8322.5.1464.

MLA:

Sobol, Blythe. “Andrew Plimer, Double-Sided Portrait, Probably of a Husband and Wife, ca. 1790,” 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: 10.37764/8322.5.1464.

See the artist’s biography in volume 4.

This double-sided miniature by Andrew Plimer includes a portrait of a man and a woman joined together in a single case.¹ Their identities are unknown, but their intimate pairing suggests that they may have been husband and wife. Double portraits were traditionally made to commemorate a couple’s marriage or engagement. They began as symbols of political or economic capital, as marriage was often a civic partnership brokered between two families or countries. By the late eighteenth century, however, such double portraits, and the marriages that produced them, increasingly developed from romantic attachment. While their identities have not yet been uncovered, this pair nevertheless provides visual insight on Plimer’s British clientele and his working practice in the early 1790s.

This miniature is unsigned, which, along with the sitters’ clothing and hair, suggests that it dates to Plimer’s second phase, which began in about 1790.² By that time, Plimer was working by rote in a formula, placing his sitters at a three-quarters angle before a sky background populated with fluffy clouds, drawn with quick white hatching. At this stage, he was less concerned with emphasizing the individuality of his sitters than with furthering his reputation as a painter of stylish portraits that were recognizable as his work to his society clientele. His miniatures were sized to be wearable, becoming fashion accessories in themselves.

Plimer’s artistic priorities are particularly evident in the woman’s portrait seen here; her large, limpid gray eyes and conventionally attractive features correspond to fashionable ideals of the period.³ Her lightly powdered brown hair is adorned with a string of pearls at the crown of her head, matching the pearls garlanding her shoulder seam. Her gown, with its frothy white ruffled neckline, exemplifies those worn by leaders of fashion, such as Georgiana, Duchess of Devonshire and Lady Emma Hamilton.⁴ The male sitter, too, is conventionally dressed. In the early 1790s, gentlemen of the upper classes with the means to commission portraits by an in-demand artist like Plimer still powdered their hair. Likewise, his white cravat and sober high-collared brown coat, cut close to his body, with large fabric-covered buttons, is typical of those produced by London’s smartest clothiers.⁵ Plimer conveys the sharp tailoring of the coat through rapidly hatched strokes of brown and taupe paint, with shadowing in darker areas at the shoulder seam and along the collar and lapels. While we do not know their names, this smartly dressed couple presents a symphonic pairing in Plimer’s characteristically theatrical white and brown brushstrokes.

Notes

1. According to visiting conservator Carol Aiken, who treated the miniature in 2018, the frame is probably original and did “not appear to have ever been opened” prior to treatment. Carol Aiken, treatment report, November 1, 2018, NAMA curatorial files.

2. Vanessa Remington, “Plimer, Andrew (1763–1837),” Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, January 3, 2008, https://doi.org/10.1093/ref:odnb/22382.

3. For a fascinating, pathologically informed study of British beauty ideals in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, see Carolyn A. Day, Consumptive Chic: A History of Beauty, Fashion, and Disease (London: Bloomsbury Visual Arts, 2020).

4. The origins of this white gown are in the chemise à la reine (French for queen’s chemise), also called the robe en gaulle (French for Gaulle dress), popularized by Queen Marie Antoinette in the previous decade. See, for example, Amelia Rauser, The Age of Undress: Art, Fashion and the Classical Ideal in the 1790s (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2020). See also chemise.

5. Michele Majer, “1790–1799,” Fashion History Timeline, August 1, 2017, https://fashionhistory.fitnyc.edu/1790-1799.

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., nos. 171 and 177, as Unknown Lady and Unknown Man.

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), 265, as Portrait of a Man and Portrait of a Lady.

Ross E. Taggart, The Starr Collection of Miniatures in the William Rockhill Nelson Gallery (Kansas City, MO: Nelson Gallery-Atkins Museum, 1971), nos. 171 and 177, pp. 59–60, (repro.), as Unknown Lady and Unknown Man.