Thomas Redmond, Portrait of a Woman, ca. 1770

Chicago:

Maggie Keenan, “Thomas Redmond, Portrait of a Woman, ca. 1770,” 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/10.37764/8322.5.1477.

MLA:

Keenan, Maggie. “Thomas Redmond, Portrait of a Woman, ca. 1770,” 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: 10.37764/8322.5.1477.

See the artist’s biography in volume 4.

Previously attributed to Nathaniel Hone (Irish, 1718–1784), this portrait miniature was recently reassigned to the artist Thomas Redmond. Redmond’s work is recognizable by his sitter’s overstated arched eyebrows and oversized almond-shaped eyes.¹ Although portrait miniature scholar Daphne Foskett described Redmond’s miniatures as “reminiscent of the early works of N. Hone,” the present portrait does not have the detailed quality of Hone’s work; it displays hatching throughout the face, rather than the stippled effect seen in Hone’s portraits.²

The Nelson-Atkins portrait depicts a young woman looking off into the distance, displaying a trace of a smile, with Redmond’s signature slightly upturned mouth. Her lips are thin, almost sunken in, with a hint of a shadow atop her upper lip, and her natural hair is upswept, with escaping strands adorning her dainty neck. The woman’s hairstyle dates the portrait to the 1770s, when increasingly tall hairstyles reached their peak. Her brown curls blur into the fur trim of her dress, and the linear mark-making delineates the fur from the delicate curves of the dress’s lace lining.³

The sitter’s eyes are so enlarged that they have a doll-like appearance, and they match the curve of her larger-than-life eyebrows. Her skin has pink and purple undertones, which blend into the violet of her sketchily rendered dress. Closer examination reveals Redmond’s reductive scratching technique—visible atop the sitter’s eyebrows and along the bottom of her nose—which he employed to outline facial features.

Redmond frequently signed his work with a cursive “T. R.” or “T. Redmond” and occasionally included a date. While the Nelson-Atkins work does not have a visible signature, one may be disguised amid the dark green-gray background to the sitter’s right. Or perhaps the portrait depicts the artist’s young wife, who would have been around twenty in 1770, and was therefore a personal keepsake, not warranting a signature.

Notes

1. See Thomas Redmond, A Gentleman Called Mr. Bonham and His Son Harry, ca. 1765, watercolor on ivory, 1 3/4 in. (4.2 cm) high, sold at Chiswick Auctions, “Fine Portrait Miniatures Including the Comerford Collection,” March 25, 2020, lot 15, https://www.chiswickauctions.co.uk/auction/lot/lot-15---thomas-redmondbritish-c-1745-1785-two/?lot=57295; and An Unknown Naval Officer, 1761, watercolor on ivory, 1 3/4 in. (4.2 cm), previously in the collection of R. Bayne Powell, illustrated in Daphne Foskett, A Dictionary of British Miniature Painters (New York: Praeger, 1972), pl. 64D.

2. Foskett, Dictionary of British Miniature Painters, 463.

3. See the similar way that Redmond approaches painting lace in Thomas Redmond, A Lady, n.d., watercolor on ivory, 1 3/8 in. (3.5 cm) high, sold at Christie’s, London, “The Sunday Sale,” March 29, 2009, lot 84, https://www.christies.com/lot/lot-5184372.

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. 43, as by Nathaniel Hone, 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. 43, p. 19, (repro.), as by Nathaniel Hone, Unknown Lady.