Richard Cosway, Portrait of a Woman, 1787

Chicago:

Aimee Marcereau DeGalan, “Richard Cosway, Portrait of a Woman, 1787,” 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. 2, ed. Aimee Marcereau DeGalan (Kansas City, MO: Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art, 2024), https://doi.org/10.37764/8322.5.1324.

MLA:

Marcereau DeGalan, Aimee. “Richard Cosway, Portrait of a Woman, 1787,” 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. 2, Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art, 2024. doi: 10.37764/8322.5.1324.

See the artist’s biography in volume 4.

This portrait of an unidentified woman, painted in 1787, presents her at the height of fashion, wearing what was later known as a “Gainsborough hat,” so-called after the large-brimmed hats worn by fashionable sitters of the English portrait painter Thomas Gainsborough (1727–1788). The sitter’s hat is covered in white ostrich feathers popularized by another member of the ton, Georgiana, Duchess of Devonshire (1757–1806), whose three-foot ostrich-feather headdresses and extravagant towers of powdered hair made her a fashion plate that many women sought to emulate.

Cosway painted this stylish woman a year after his formal appointment to the Prince of Wales, later King George IV (r. 1820–1830), who provided ample commissions until the artist fell from favor in 1811. In 1785, the prince allowed Cosway to sign his work with the extravagant Latin title Primarius pictor serenissimi Walliae principis (Principal painter to his Royal Highness the Prince of Wales), the inscription on the reverse of this miniature.¹ As in many of Cosway’s other portraits, this female sitter wears a diaphanous white muslin dress. It has an elaborate Van Dyck collar that falls against her shoulders and an elevated upright Medici collar that frames her white neck, face, and powdered hair. Cosway owned several prints after works by Sir Anthony Van Dyck (Flemish, 1599–1641), Peter Paul Rubens (Flemish, 1577–1640) and Rembrandt (Dutch, 1606–1669), from which he adopted and adapted their sitter’s fashions in his own works.² This lent a timeless quality to Cosway’s sitters in the ever-fickle and changing face of fashion.

Notes

1. Stephen Lloyd, “Richard Cosway,” Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, last updated January 3, 2008, https://doi.org/10.1093/ref:odnb/6383.

2. For more on Cosway’s collection, see Stephen Lloyd, “The Cosway Inventory of 1820: Listing Unpaid Commissions and the Contents of 20 Stratford Place, Oxford Street, London,” Volume of the Walpole Society 66 (2004): 163–217.

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. 62, as Unknown Lady.

Martha Jane and John W. Starr, “Collecting Portrait Miniatures,” Antiques 80, no. 5 (November 1961): 438–39, (repro.), 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. 62, p. 25, (repro.), as Unknown Lady.