Gervase Spencer, Portrait of a Woman, 1747

Chicago:

Aimee Marcereau DeGalan, “Gervase Spencer, Portrait of a Woman, 1747,” 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/10.37764/8322.5.1644.

MLA:

Marcereau DeGalan, Aimee. “Gervase Spencer, Portrait of a Woman, 1747,” 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: 10.37764/8322.5.1644.

See the artist’s biography in volume 4.

Gervase Spencer was equally prolific in both enamel and watercolor, but this early portrait of a woman, attached to an 1840s hair bracelet that was added to make the miniature fashionable again, represents the museum’s only example of the artist’s output in the latter. Small in scale and honest in address, this so-called “modest miniature” is less than two inches tall.¹ It exemplifies the unpretentious and straightforward aesthetic of the English Modest School of miniatures, painted during a roughly twenty-year period from the 1740s to the 1760s.²

The diminutive scale is not the only intimate aspect of the portrait. The sitter appears in a low-cut blue silk gown with a matching blue choker and hair ribbon. She wears large pendant pearl earrings and a diaphanous white fichu, draped over her shoulders as an indication of modesty. Fichus were an important staple of the eighteenth-century woman’s wardrobe and remained popular throughout the period. While on the one hand they provided modest cover, some authors from the period suggested they incited just the opposite reaction. Denis Diderot (1713–1784) defined the term in his Encyclopedia:

Fichu, part of a woman’s underclothing. It is a square or rectangular piece of muslin, or of another white or colored cloth, or even silk, which is folded in two at the angles and covers the neck. The point of the fichu falls in the middle of the back and covers the shoulders; the extremities are crossed in front and cover the chest; but with white skin, curves, firm flesh, and a bosom, even the most innocent peasant woman knows how to let just enough show by arranging the folds of her fichu.³

Indeed, Spencer’s painted fichu—skillfully rendered to show floral whitework embroidery along the central seam, leading down sitter’s chest, and along the bottom edges—reveals as much as it conceals, making this small-scale portrait of a woman seem all the more intimate.⁴

Notes

1. Graham Reynolds, English Portrait Miniatures (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988), 112.

2. Marjorie E. Wieseman discusses this aspect of another early miniature by Gervase Spencer in Julie Aronson and Marjorie E. Wieseman, Perfect Likeness: European and American Portrait Miniatures from the Cincinnati Art Museum (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2006), 293.

3. Denis Diderot, “Fichu,” Encyclopédie ou Dictionnaire raisonné des sciences, des arts et des métiers (Paris, 1756), 6:678; repr., in The Encyclopedia of Diderot et d’Alembert Collaborative Translation Project, trans. Malcolm Eden (Ann Arbor: Michigan Publishing, University of Michigan Library, 2007), http://hdl.handle.net/2027/spo.did2222.0000.838. Emphasis in the original.

4. In their survey of the Nelson-Atkins collection in 2017, miniature dealer Elle Shushan and miniature conservator Carol Aiken indicated that the miniature is mounted in an 1840s frame on a woven hair bracelet, a common practice to make the miniature fashionable again. The miniature may have a bracelet mount inside its current mount, or the sitter may be in a sealed compartment case. Notes in NAMA curatorial files.

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. 38, 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. 38, p. 18, (repro.), as Unknown Lady.