Samuel Shelley, Portrait of a Woman, 1794/95

Chicago:

Aimee Marcereau DeGalan, “Samuel Shelley, Portrait of a Woman, 1794/95,” 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/10.37764/8322.5.1504.

MLA:

Marcereau DeGalan, Aimee. “Samuel Shelley, Portrait of a Woman, 1794/95,” 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: 10.37764/8322.5.1504.

See the artist’s biography in volume 4.

Shown in three-quarters profile, with bright blue-green eyes under characteristically arched kohl brows and a mass of powdered and curled hair, this female sitter is the epitome of late 1700s English fashion. An inscription on the reverse of this work gives the artist Samuel Shelley’s address as 6 George Street, Hanover Square, where he lived from 1794 until his death in 1808. The cut of the dress and style of the sitter’s hair place the work soon after the artist began living there, around 1795—probably before the imposition of the tax on hair powder in May of that year, which cost one guinea, or the equivalent of one week’s pay for an average worker.¹

The tax was one of the government’s efforts to help offset the cost of the war with France, which lasted from 1793 until 1815.² The war affected many things between these two countries, including the communication of fashion. While French dress looked to the classical past of Greece and Rome, English dress was a “cluttered synthesis of the prevailing Neoclassical styles with the addition of Romantic ornament.”³ Such is the case with the dress worn by the woman in this portrait: a variation on the simple wrapping gown of white muslin with bows added to the shoulders.⁴

Shelley painted these details with a heavy application of watercolor and gum arabic, an element he added to give the appearance of oil paint rather than translucent watercolor. This brilliant application of color and his approach to his sitter in this glamorous portrait align him with artists like Sir Joshua Reynolds (1723–1792), whose intensely colored Grand Manner portraits of London’s most fashionable set graced the walls of the Royal Academy annually every spring, alongside examples by Shelley.

Notes

1. William Pitt introduced the Duty on Hair Powder Act on May 5, 1795, as an Act of the Parliament of Great Britain. Exemptions to this act included the royal family and their servants; clergymen with an annual income under one hundred pounds; and members of the armed forces who were privates in the army, artillery soldiers, mariners, engineers, non-commissioned officers, subalterns, officers in the navy below commander, yeomanry, militia, fencibles, and volunteers. The act was repealed in 1869. Stephen Dowell, A History of Taxation and Taxes in England from the Earliest Times to the Year 1885 (London: Longmans, Green, 1888), 3:255–59. For currency conversions, I used a combination of two historic currency calculators: Frink https://futureboy.us/fsp/dollar.fsp?quantity=1&currency=guineas&fromYear=1795, which extends to the present day, and the National Archives currency converter, https://www.nationalarchives.gov.uk/currency-converter/, which spans 1270 to 2017 and offers the parallel analogy of equivalencies outside of currency.

2. However, those people with a guinea (the historical equivalent of around $125 in 2023) could register for a hair powder certificate, pay the duty, and not risk being fined.

3. Aileen Ribeiro, The Art of Dress: Fashion in England and France, 1750 to 1820 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1995), 109.

4. The importation of raw cotton rose four times between 1780 and 1800, with the price of the material falling steeply once the plantation system was established in the American South. Cotton was also easily adaptable to the new machinery of the Industrial Revolution, with eager markets in both England and France. See Ribeiro, The Art of Dress, 110.

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. 157, as Unknown Lady.

Martha Jane and John W. Starr, “Collecting Portrait Miniatures,” Antiques 80, no. 5 (November 1961): 440, (repro.), as Portrait of a Lady.

Ross E. Taggart, The Starr Collection of Miniatures in the William Rockhill Nelson Gallery (Kansas City, MO: Nelson Gallery-Atkins Museum, 1971), no. 157, p. 54, (repro.), as Unknown Lady.