John Smart, Portrait of a Woman, 1804

Chicago:

Blythe Sobol, “John Smart, Portrait of a Woman, 1804,” 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/10.37764/8322.5.1626.

MLA:

Sobol, Blythe. “John Smart, Portrait of a Woman, 1804,” 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: 10.37764/8322.5.1626.

See the artist’s biography in volume 4.

This poised and elegant lady appears to have stepped out of a novel by Jane Austen. No longer in the first flush of youth, she would be a fitting stand-in for Anne Elliot, Austen’s sensitive and self-possessed protagonist in Persuasion (1817). While she remains unidentified, the case for this miniature is monogrammed with the initials JHJ, which some intrepid future scholar may yet decode. Daphne Foskett’s list of Smart’s known sitters, an excellent although not exhaustive resource, has not revealed any sitters—or spouses of sitters—with comparable initials.¹

Like many of Smart’s sitters, who were predominantly of the upper middle classes, this woman is attractively and respectably dressed, although perhaps not in the absolute height of fashion for 1804, the year this miniature was painted. She wears a white dress with ruffled lace trim overlaid with a blue surcoat, with drawn-up sleeves and delicate matching bows at the corners of her bodice and bustline. Her hair is accented with a pearl-studded clip and styled with forehead-framing curls in the neoclassical style, inspired by ancient Greek and Roman statuary excavated in the last decades of the eighteenth century. To achieve this look, she—or more likely a maidservant—would have spent hours painstakingly rolling locks of hair with strips of tissue paper and a papillote iron heated with hot coals.² The sitter’s high waistline, too, reflects the groundbreaking silhouette first adopted in the 1790s, in a conscious effort to evoke the fashions of classical antiquity.³ The low, square neckline of her dress highlights her swanlike neck and gently sloping shoulders, both highly prized beauty features of the period.

Smart pays particular attention to the peaches-and-cream tones of the sitter’s skin, flushed with washes of peachy pigment along the cheeks, nose, collarbone, and chin, while his use of dual red and purple tones in her lower and upper lips reflects his study of the works of Christian Friedrich Zincke (German, ca. 1684–1767). Smart’s miniature of Charlotte Porcher, also in the Nelson-Atkins collection, is another striking example of this technique. Notwithstanding this sitter’s purple-shadowed eyes and fullness below her chin—hallmarks of Smart’s devotion to forthright, if not outright unflattering depictions—this miniature presents the sitter with a cool and sophisticated mien, her introspective gaze and undereye circles suggesting a late night spent reading, or writing, by candlelight.

Notes

1. Daphne Foskett, John Smart: The Man and His Miniatures (London: Cory, Adams, and Mackay, 1964), 69.

2. The papillote iron and curling papers apparently included George Gordon, Lord Byron among their most devoted adherents. Ress Howell Gronow recorded an amusing anecdote from Lord Byron’s life, noting that “as a student in Cambridge, [Byron] was allegedly discovered by a friend one morning with his hair en papillote, or folded into papers. Said his friend, Scrope Davies, ‘it was my conviction that your hair curled naturally.’ ‘Yes,’ replied Byron carelessly, ‘naturally every night.’” Ress Howell Gronow, Reminiscences of Captain Gronow: Anecdotes of the Camp, the Court, and the Clubs, at the Close of the Last War with France (London: Smith, Elder, 1862), 209, quoted in Susan J. Vincent, Hair: An Illustrated History (London: Bloomsbury, 2018), 42.

3. See, for example, Amelia Rauser, The Age of Undress: Art, Fashion, and the Classical Ideal in the 1790s (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2020), which traces the development of this new fashion and its origins in antiquity.

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 Lady.

The Starr Foundation Collection of Miniatures, The Royal Ontario Museum, Toronto, December 8, 1972–January 14, 1973, no cat., no. 137, 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.

Daphne Foskett, “Miniatures by John Smart: The Nelson Gallery-Atkins Museum,” Antiques 90, no. 3 (September 1966): 356, (repro.).

Ross E. Taggart, The Starr Collection of Miniatures in the William Rockhill Nelson Gallery (Kansas City, MO: Nelson Gallery-Atkins Museum, 1971), no. 137, pp. 31, 48, (repro.), as Unknown Lady.

Blythe Sobol, “An Outsized Passion for Miniatures: The Starr Collection of Portrait Miniatures at the Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art,” in Portrait Miniatures: Artists, Functions, Techniques, and Collections (Petersberg, Germany: Michael Imhof Verlag, 2023), 243, (repro.).