John Smart, Portrait of a Woman, 1772

Chicago:

Aimee Marcereau DeGalan, “John Smart, Portrait of a Woman, 1772,” 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. 4, ed. Aimee Marcereau DeGalan (Kansas City, MO: Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art, 2025), https://doi.org/10.37764/8322.5.1530.

MLA:

Marcereau DeGalan, Aimee. “John Smart, Portrait of a Woman, 1772,” 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. 4, Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art, 2025. doi: 10.37764/8322.5.1530.

See the artist’s biography in volume 4.

This sitter wears a variation on what was known as “Van Dyck” or Van Dyck dress, recalling the styles featured in portraits by the court painter Sir Anthony Van Dyck (Flemish, 1599–1641) and his contemporaries from the 1620s and 1630s.¹ This type of historicizing dress was a popular choice for masquerade attire and portraiture in the eighteenth century, but it invariably also included elements from the sitter’s own period, such as this woman’s fashionable hairstyle.² Key features of this type of dress included ribbon-slashed sleeves, scalloped-edge trim, and asymmetrical pearl jewelry. As Aileen Ribeiro suggests, asymmetry was often further enhanced through the use of scarves and loose, floating drapery.³ All of these features can be found in this relatively early portrait by John Smart, made in 1772.

This young woman with upswept, powdered hair looks off toward the left. Her body remains square to the picture plane, and she wears a coral-colored satin dress with matching ribbon-slashed sleeves. The dress features a scalloped-edge lace trim along its décolleté neckline, further embellished by a strand of pearls that extend down the front of her bodice at an angle. An off-white satin cloak is draped over her right shoulder. Smart would likely have been familiar with the styles of dress worn in paintings by Van Dyck and his contemporaries; it was, Ribeiro writes, “part of the common consciousness of all the important artists painting in England in the eighteenth-century.”⁴

Despite the beauty and richness of the satin and lace of the gown, Smart renders his sitter unsparingly. Anatomically, her head is too large for her body, which is a hallmark of Smart’s portraits at this point in his career.⁵ Although she has large, kind brown eyes, they are heavily creased at the corners, and her fleshy double chin suggests she is a mature woman. This early work reflects Smart’s commitment to capturing his subjects with unflinching realism, even within the fictive stylization of fancy dress.

Notes

1. Van Dyck worked in England from 1620 to 1621, returned there in 1632, and remained until his death ten years later.

2. Aileen Ribeiro, “Some Evidence of the Influence of the Dress of the Seventeenth Century on Costume in Eighteenth-Century Female Portraiture,” Burlington Magazine 119, no. 897 (1977): 834.

3. Ribeiro, “Some Evidence,” 834. Asymmetry was also championed by English painter, engraver, and social critic William Hogarth (1697–1764) in his treatise on art, The Analysis of Beauty (1753). Hogarth argued that variety, irregularity, and movement provided greater expression. He was against uniformity across all fronts. In manners of women’s dress, he suggested that “when they are at liberty to make what shapes they please in ornamenting their persons, those of the best taste choose it irregular as the more engaging.” William Hogarth, The Analysis of Beauty: Written with a View of Fixing the Fluctuating Ideas of Taste (London: J. Reeves, 1753), 34.

4. Ribeiro, “Some Evidence,” 838.

5. Cory Korkow makes this observation in reference to a portrait sketch realized by John Smart around 1772 in the Cleveland Museum of Art: Portrait of a Woman, ca. 1772, 1941.569. See Cory Korkow and Jon L. Seydl, British Portrait Miniatures: The Cleveland Museum of Art (Cleveland: Cleveland Museum of Art, 2013), 166.

Mr. John W. (1905–2000) and Mrs. Martha Jane (1906–2011) Starr, Kansas City, MO, by 1965;

Their gift to the Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art, Kansas City, MO, 1965.

John Smart, Portrait of a Woman, ca. 1772, graphite and wash on laid paper, 2 3/16 x 1 1/2 in. (5.5 x 3.8 cm), The Cleveland Museum of Art, 1941.569.

The Starr Foundation Collection of Miniatures, The Royal Ontario Museum, Toronto, December 8, 1972–January 14, 1973, no cat., no. 98, as Unknown Lady.

John Smart: Virtuoso in Miniature, The Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art, Kansas City, MO, December 21, 2024–January 4, 2026, no cat., as Portrait of a Woman.

Ross E. Taggart, The Starr Collection of Miniatures in the William Rockhill Nelson Gallery (Kansas City, MO: Nelson Gallery-Atkins Museum, 1971), no. 98, p. 38, (repro.), as Unknown Lady.