Gervase Spencer, Portrait of a Woman, 1753

Chicago:

Aimee Marcereau DeGalan, “Gervase Spencer, Portrait of a Woman, 1753,” 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/10.37764/8322.5.1646.

MLA:

Marcereau DeGalan, Aimee. “Gervase Spencer, Portrait of a Woman, 1753,” 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: 10.37764/8322.5.1646.

See the artist’s biography in volume 4.

The subject of Gervase Spencer’s miniature wears a garment made of pink satin and white lace, accentuated by green ribbons at her bosom and neck and in her strawberry blonde hair. The ensemble, although lacking a hat, is reminiscent of the fashion inspired by milkmaids popularized by the mistress of King Louis XV of France, Madame de Pompadour. Pompadour frequently wore pink, and she built several pleasure dairies at Versailles and Fontainebleau, where she and a select group of companions would spend their days dressed as milkmaids and shepherdesses, pretending to be simple peasant girls.¹

Madame de Pompadour, whose family had made their fortune selling provisions to the army, was known for her enthusiasm for consumer novelties, and she brought this passion to Versailles. Although her physical affair with the king lasted only from 1745 to 1750, she wielded significant cultural and political influence. She was a fashion icon not only in France but in England as well, evident in her visible influence on the attire of the present sitter.²

While the portrait in question was undoubtedly personally significant to its owner, it features clothing and jewelry that can also be seen in other paintings, indicating that Spencer may have reused these items for both his own convenience and that of his sitters.³ Some of Spencer’s other works indicate that “he borrowed poses and costumes from the portraits of French artist, Jean Etienne Liotard (1689–1762),”⁴ which would further explain the French influence of this unknown woman’s dress.

Notes

1. For more information on Madame de Pompadour’s passion for pink, see A. Cassandra Albinson, Mark Ledbury, Gabriella Szalay, and Oliver Wunsch, Madame De Pompadour: Painted Pink (Cambridge, MA: Harvard Art Museums, 2022). See also Meredith Martin, Dairy Queens: The Politics of Pastoral Architecture from Catherine de’ Medici to Marie-Antoinette (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2011), 114–57.

2. For background on Madame de Pompadour and a more nuanced read on the discourses surrounding art making, femininity, artifice, and social class, see Melissa Hyde, “The ‘Makeup’ of the Marquise: Boucher’s Portrait of Pompadour at Her Toilette,” Art Bulletin 82, no. 3 (September 2000): 453–75.

3. A very similarly clad woman (in fact, the woman herself is physically similar to the Nelson-Atkins sitter) appears in a portrait by Spencer from 1756; see Gervase Spencer, Portrait of a Lady, 1756, enamel, set on the inside lid of a gold-mounted tortoiseshell box, sold at Old Master Paintings and Portrait Miniatures, Sotheby’s, London, April 28, 2021, lot 502, https://www.sothebys.com/en/buy/auction/2021/old-master-paintings/portrait-of-a-lady-3.

4. Katherine Coombs, “Gervase Spencer (c. 1715–1763),” Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, September 23, 2004, https://doi.org/10.1093/ref:odnb/26127.

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. 37, 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. 37, p. 18, (repro.), as Unknown Lady.