Unknown, Portrait of a Girl, Probably Lady Elizabeth Cavendish-Bentinck, ca. 1800

Chicago:

Blythe Sobol, “Unknown, Portrait of a Girl, Probably Lady Elizabeth Cavendish-Bentinck, ca. 1800,” 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, MO: Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art, 2024), https://doi.org/10.37764/8322.5.1690.

MLA:

Sobol Blythe. “Unknown, Portrait of a Girl, Probably Lady Elizabeth Cavendish-Bentinck, ca. 1800,” 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: 10.37764/8322.5.1690.

The young woman in this portrait miniature by an unknown English artist may be Harriet Elizabeth Cavendish-Bentinck (1787–1862), granddaughter of William Bentinck, 2nd Duke of Portland.¹ She would have been in her early to mid-teens when this miniature was painted. The artist accentuates her wide, doll-like blue eyes with a sheer wash of gray on the upper and lower lids and with flushed, full cheeks and lips that further emphasize her youth. She is posed in three-quarters view to highlight her aquiline nose.²

The fashionable neoclassical attire of the sitter, which took inspiration from ancient Greece and Rome, suggests an approximate date of 1799. The artist’s thin, delicate upward brushstrokes emphasize the sheer and filmy fabric—probably muslin—of the sitter’s white dress, in a style that was first worn in France in the 1790s in emulation of the clinging draperies of ancient Greek sculpture.³ The gold torpedo earrings were also inspired by archaeological discoveries made in the 1780s; they were worn to highlight the bare, open necklines that were newly in fashion. The sitter’s hair is styled in the Grecian fashion, with loose curls accented by a braid and a blue ribbon wrapped around the crown of her head, worn down as an indicator of her youth and likely unmarried status. Harriet Cavendish-Bentinck married Sir William Mordaunt Milner in 1809, about a decade after this was painted.⁴

This portrait was previously attributed to the miniaturist Richard Collins (1755–1831) due to its inscription with the initials “RC.” The initials were probably added later, in an attempt to connect the work to Richard Cosway (1742–1821), as Collins rarely signed his work.⁵ The artist of this charming portrait, possibly a talented amateur, is still unknown.

Notes

1. This miniature was previously identified as Lady Elizabeth Cavendish-Benticke [sic], in reference to Lady Elizabeth Cavendish-Bentinck, Marchioness of Bath (1735–1825), who would have been in her sixties when this miniature was painted. If the title has some basis in truth, the portrait’s more likely subject is Lady Elizabeth’s niece, Harriet Elizabeth, the daughter of Lord Edward Charles Cavendish-Bentinck (1744–1819) and Elizabeth Cumberland (d. 1837). I am grateful to former Starr intern Cara Nordengren for her assistance in identifying the sitter.

2. The sitter bears a slight resemblance to a portrait of Cavendish-Bentinck’s mother, Elizabeth Cumberland, by George Romney, previously with Lowell Libson and Jonny Yarker, Ltd., London, particularly in the shape of the nose and mouth. See “George Romney, 1734–1802, Lady Edward Bentinck, née Elizabeth Cumberland,” Lowell Libson and Jonny Yarker, Ltd., accessed October 26, 2022, https://www.libson-yarker.com/recent-sales/lady-edward-bentinck-nee-elizabeth-cumberland.

3. Amelia Rauser has written extensively on this subject: “In the 1790s, elite women appeared in the metropolitan ballrooms, gardens, and opera boxes of Europe and the United States dressed as living statues.” Amelia Rauser, The Age of Undress: Art, Fashion and the Classical Ideal in the 1790s (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2020), 7.

4. Edmund Lodge, The Peerage, Baronetage, Knightage & Companionage of the British Empire for 1907 (London: Kelly’s Directories, 1907), 1263. She married Sir William Mordaunt Sturt Milner (1779–1855), 4th Baronet, on May 28, 1809. They had nine children between 1810 and 1825.

5. Similarly, Portrait of an Officer at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York (62.122.46) was previously attributed to Richard Collins due to its inscribed RC monogram. As the catalogue entry remarks, “the inscription RC . . . was probably intended to convey the impression that it is by Richard Cosway, . . . which it is not. It is a feeble work of the early nineteenth century.” Graham Reynolds and Katherine Baetjer, European Miniatures in The Metropolitan Museum of Art (New York: Metropolitan Museum of Art, 1996), 200.

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. 160, as by Richard Collins, Lady Elizabeth Cavendish.

John W. and Martha Jane Starr, “Collecting Portrait Miniatures,” Antiques 80, no. 5 (November 1961): 441.

Ross E. Taggart, The Starr Collection of Miniatures in the William Rockhill Nelson Gallery (Kansas City, MO: Nelson Gallery-Atkins Museum, 1971), no. 160, p. 55, (repro.), as by Richard Collins, Lady Elizabeth Cavendish.