Andrew Plimer, Portrait of a Woman, ca. 1790

Chicago:

Aimee Marcereau DeGalan, “Andrew Plimer, Portrait of a Woman, 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, MO: Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art, 2024), https://doi.org/10.37764/8322.5.1463.

MLA:

Marcereau DeGalan, Aimee. “Andrew Plimer, Portrait of a Woman, 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: 10.37764/8322.5.1463.

See the artist’s biography in volume 4.

This sitter’s white muslin dress with a falling stand collar, string of pearls, and powdered hair with a pink bandeau reveal little about her identity, but more clues may come from the back of the miniature. Glass covers the entire reverse, which contains a large hairwork display below a pair of gold foliated initials, “CC.” A single broadly curved lock, tied with seed pearls ending in a folded-over flourish in a style known as a Prince of Wales feather, is set against a Bristol glass background.¹ Traditionally, hair found on the reverse belonged to the sitter, suggesting here that her natural hair color was golden blonde. The inclusion of the hair and initials adds a sentimental touch to this miniature, created around 1790.

The year 1789 marks a dividing line in Andrew Plimer’s work, separating it into two phases of his career. In works made before 1789, which are often accompanied by the artist’s initials and a date, Plimer’s sitters appear more naturalistically rendered. Works realized after 1789, such as this one, are not signed or dated. This period coincides with the artist’s increased output, and he took shortcuts to meet demands, such as reducing his palette and homogenizing the features of his sitters, with their large doe eyes, elongated noses, and small mouths, as seen here. The result is that many of his sitters look alike, as in this portrait and his portrait of Joyce, Lady Lake, realized around the same time. Another shift in Plimer’s second phase is that he began to work on larger ivories from 1800 on. The present work is slightly smaller than the Lady Lake portrait, which suggests it may have been completed before that miniature.

Notes

1. Prince of Wales feathers were among of the period’s more difficult types of hair manipulation, accomplished with the use of multiple curling irons, candle flame, needles, camel-hair brushes, adhesive (gum tragacanth), and weights. See Alexanna Speight, The Lock of Hair: Its History, Ancient and Modern, Natural and Artistic (London: A. Goubaud and Son, 1871), 89–95.

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. 172, 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. 172, p. 59, (repro.), as Unknown Lady.