John Smart, Portrait of a Woman, Probably Maria Montgomerie, 1789

Chicago:

Blythe Sobol, “John Smart, Portrait of a Woman, Probably Maria Montgomerie, 1789,” 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/10.37764/8322.5.1584.

MLA:

Sobol, Blythe. “John Smart, Portrait of a Woman, Probably Maria Montgomerie, 1789,” 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: 10.37764/8322.5.1584.

See the artist’s biography in volume 4.

In 1789, the year this miniature was painted, a London newspaper reported that John Smart “has painted everybody at Bombay, and is gone to Bengal.”¹ In Bengal, Smart would have sought patrons in Calcutta (modern-day Kolkata), the Honourable East India Company’s (HEIC) main colonial outpost in the province. The sitter in this portrait, previously identified as “Mrs. Montgomery,” is probably Maria Montgomerie (née Chantry), the wife of Archibald Montgomerie, a senior merchant of the HEIC.² The Montgomeries married at St. John’s Church, Calcutta, on May 10, 1781.³

The previous year, a Calcutta diarist, Eliza Fay, wrote in December 1780 of meeting then-Miss Chantry, “a most amiable and interesting young lady” who was living with Dr. Rowland Jackson, the leading physician in the city. According to Fay, Maria Chantry had come out in colonial Bengal society alongside Jackson’s new daughter-in-law, Phoebe Jackson (née Tuting). Chantry was probably boarding with the family of this respectable doctor, described by Fay as “physician to the Company and in very high practice besides,” for the sake of propriety as well as his social connections.⁴

Colonial society was well known for its shortage of eligible young women—it was rare for unmarried ladies to travel alone to India, despite its notorious marriage market.⁵ Young men flocked to India to make their fortunes before seeking an advantageous match; therefore, marriageable young women were in high demand among British officers and civil servants. Maria Chantry was particularly singled out as one of Calcutta’s beauties by a local newspaper, Hicky’s Bengal Gazette, as one of “The Five Girls who grace India’s soil.”⁶ Her standing in Calcutta was matched, if not surpassed, by her future husband, who descended from an ancient Scottish family; in 1796, his elder brother Hugh would inherit the earldom of Eglinton from a third cousin.⁷

In Smart’s portrait, Maria Montgomerie, by then a young mother, is fashionably dressed in a nearly translucent white fichu and dress, which features an unusual triangular trim along the shoulder seam. Her full, lilac-powdered hair or wig is styled with two long locks falling on each side. While her lightweight garments are practical for the hot Indian climate, her fair skin—which Smart emphasizes with bluish-green veins and shadows along her forehead and nose—is flushed, with a faint sheen of perspiration visible along her upper lip, nose, and cheeks. Despite the high mortality rate among British colonists in India,⁸ Maria Montgomerie lived until 1835, well into her seventh decade.⁹

Notes

1. London World, April 10, 1789, 3.

2. While he was recorded as a junior merchant at the time of his marriage (see n. 3), three years later, the baptismal record for one of their sons, Archibald, on December 29, 1784, identifies him as a senior merchant; “Baptisms in Calcutta: 1783–1785,” Bengal Past and Present 27, nos. 53–54 (January–June 1924): 197, 215. The elder Montgomerie was baptized on June 6, 1751, in Tarbolton, Ayr, Scotland, the son of Alexander Montgomerie of Coysfield and Lilias Montgomerie of Skelmorley; Scotland, Select Births and Baptisms, 1564–1950, digitized on ancestry.com.

3. While HEIC records also document a “Henry Montgomery” and “Alex. Montgomery” in India at this time, they did not seem to have wives, daughters, or other female relatives who might have sat for this portrait in either Madras or Calcutta. See, for example, The Bengal Calendar for the Year 1789 (Calcutta and London: John Stockdale, 1789), 54, 67; “Marriages in Calcutta,” Bengal Past and Present 7 (January–June 1911): 165. See also Archibald Montgomerie to Maria Chantry, May 1781, India Office Ecclesiastical Returns-Bengal Presidency, FHL film no. 498608, Select Marriages, 1792–1948, digitized on ancestry.com. Spelling of names at this time was not yet fully standardized; even the well-known Montgomerie family, headed by the Earl of Eglinton, was misspelled in various period publications; for example, see Alexander Nisbet, A System of Heraldry, Speculative and Practical (Edinburgh: Alex. Lawrie, 1804), 1:377. George Crawford wrote of the family in 1818, including “Archibald Montgomery of Stair, [who] was in the civil service of the East India Company on the Bengal establishment, on which he was placed in 1770”; George Crawford, A General Description of the Shire of Renfrew (Paisley: J. Neilson, 1818), 259.

4. Rev. Walter Kelly Firminger, ed., The Original Letters from India of Mrs. Eliza Fay (Calcutta: Thacker, Spink, 1908), 147, 233–34.

5. When the miniaturist Diana Hill (née Dietz, 1755–1844) traveled to India as a twenty-six-year-old widow with two young children, her lack of a husband’s protection scandalized Calcutta’s socialites. Her competitor Ozias Humphry (1742–1810) was more concerned with her artistic talent, proclaiming that he would “rather have all the male painters in England landed in Bengal than this single woman.” Julie Aronson and Betsy Wieseman, Perfect Likeness: European and American Portrait Miniatures from the Cincinnati Art Museum (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2006), 209.

6. The anonymous author wrote of Maria Chantry, “Since life is a Jest, we’ll drink till we die, So here’s to the Beautifull and lovely Miss C-----y.” All of the poem’s subjects except “Miss H-----d” have been identified. “Poet’s Corner: A Song,” Hicky’s Bengal Gazette, or The Original Calcutta General Advertiser, April 21–28, 1781, https://digi.ub.uni-heidelberg.de/diglit/hbg1781_14/0004/image,info; Firminger, Original Letters from India of Mrs. Eliza Fay, 234.

7. John Brooke and Edith, Lady Haden-Guest, “MONTGOMERIE, Hugh (1739–1819), of Skelmorlie and Coilsfield, Ayr,” The History of Parliament: The House of Commons 1754–1790, ed. Lewis Namier and John Brooke (New York: Oxford University Press, 1964), accessed August 15, 2024, https://www.historyofparliamentonline.org/volume/1754-1790/member/montgomerie-hugh-1739-1819.

8. “It has been calculated that of the 508 individuals appointed to the Bengal presidency between 1762 and 1784, 321 died in the East, with only 37 returning to Britain.” Andrew Mackillop, “Locality, Nation, and Empire: Scots and the Empire in Asia, ca. 1695–ca. 1813,” Scotland and the British Empire (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011), 78.

9. The date of probate for her will is September 11, 1835. See Records of the Prerogative Court of Canterbury, series 11, class 11, piece 1852, National Archives, Kew. In his 1831 will, Archibald Montgomerie referenced “the love and affection I bear to Mrs. Maria Chantry or Montgomery my wife,” making provisions for her financial support should she predecease him. Will of Archibald Montgomerie, April 9, 1831, Sheriff, Ayr, Scotland, England and Wales, Prerogative Court of Canterbury Wills, 1384–1858, digitized on ancestry.com. A Maria Chantry was baptized on January 12, 1759, in London, the daughter of Graysbrook and Mary Chantry; baptism of Maria Chantry, July 12, 1759, London, England and Wales, Non-Conformist and Non-Parochial Registers, 1567–1936, digitized on ancestry.com. If this is the same Maria Chantry who married Archibald Montgomerie, she would have been seventy-six when she died.

John W. (1905–2000) and 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—Miniaturist: 1741/2–1811, The Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art, Kansas City, MO, December 9, 1965–January 2, 1966, no cat., as Mrs. Montgomery.

The Starr Foundation Collection of Miniatures, The Royal Ontario Museum, Toronto, December 8, 1972–January 14, 1973, no cat., no. 121, as Mrs. Montgomery.

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, Probably Maria Montgomerie.

Ross E. Taggart, The Starr Collection of Miniatures in the William Rockhill Nelson Gallery (Kansas City, MO: Nelson Gallery-Atkins Museum, 1971), no. 121, p. 43, (repro.), as Mrs. Montgomery.