Sampson Towgood Roch, Portrait of a Woman, 1811

Chicago:

Maggie Keenan, “Sampson Towgood Roch, Portrait of a Woman, 1811,” 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/10.37764/8322.5.1494.

MLA:

Keenan, Maggie. “Sampson Towgood Roch, Portrait of a Woman, 1811,” 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: 10.37764/8322.5.1494.

See the artist’s biography in volume 4.

The unidentified woman in this portrait emits an air of elegance, with her frosty white gown and copper-colored curls covered by a delicately embroidered veil. The zigzag stitching along the veil’s edge offsets the loose, circular tendrils that frame her face.¹ Her countenance is pleasant, aided by her direct gaze and hint of a grin, and her eyes have an unusual caramel color that generates an ember-like glow, like those in Roch’s Portrait of Samuel Francis Dashwood. Her fair skin heightens the flush of her cheeks, perhaps caused by an applied cosmetic rouge or the artist’s recurring gaze.

It is possible that the dress the young woman is wearing, with its ruched collar and a string of pearls tucked around the base of her sleeve, is a wedding gown. Roch’s characteristic muddy green background includes a curious patch of varying color below the sitter’s left jowl. This section of blue could be from an altered composition; it is possible her veil extended down the left side of her face but was later removed by the artist. This blue underpainting is also visible in Roch’s other works: along the right side of Dashwood’s hair and in the sky background of Portrait of a Man.

Although Roch grew up in and retired to Ireland, he painted this portrait during his time as a professional painter in Bath, England.² Whether celebrating her wedding or not, the present sitter was a fashionable young woman, possibly a member of the British peerage, who flocked to Bath after the discovery of Roman baths there in 1755.³

Notes

1. For a similarly embroidered pattern, see Wedding Dress, ca. 1807, embroidered muslin dress with cotton threads, lined with linen, Victoria and Albert Museum, T.12-2013, https://collections.vam.ac.uk/item/O1261897/wedding-dress-unknown/.

2. Paul Caffrey, “Sampson Towgood Roch, Miniaturist,” Irish Arts Review 3, no. 4 (Winter 1986): 17–18. Roch lived at 11 Pierpoint Street in Bath. In 1819–22, Roch’s address for the Royal Academy exhibition is listed as 12 Pierpoint Street. Jane Austen, whose family lived in Bath for nine years, anonymously published Sense and Sensibility the same year as this miniature, in 1811. The book follows the lives of three sisters: Elinor, Marianne, and Margaret Dashwood.

3. See The Bath Guide; or, Useful Pocket Companion (Bath: R. Cruttwell, 1775).

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. 163, 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. 163, p. 56, (repro.), as Unknown Lady.