Luke Sullivan, Portrait of a Woman, 1764

Chicago:

Aimee Marcereau DeGalan, “Luke Sullivan, Portrait of a Woman, 1764,” 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: Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art, 2024), https://doi.org/10.37764/8322.5.1656.

MLA:

Marcereau DeGalan, Aimee. “Luke Sullivan, Portrait of a Woman, 1764,” 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: 10.37764/8322.5.1656

See the artist’s biography in volume 4.

Period accounts of Luke Sullivan speculate that most of his sitters were women he met in pubs.¹ Whether or not that is true remains subjective. Regardless, this portrait of an attractive young woman is typical of the artist’s oeuvre.

Here, the sitter confronts our gaze with her oversized, liquid brown eyes. She wears a blue gown with a plunging neckline edged in white lace, revealing the delicate, milky skin of her décolletage. Her natural brown hair is pulled away from her face and probably fastened in the back with some type of pearl-encrusted closure. This would have echoed the pearls at her sleeve and in the bow at her bosom. These elements of dress, in particular the lace trimming and jewel-encrusted sleeve, align with what Aileen Ribeiro terms fancy dress, deriving from the attire worn by female sitters in late portraits by Sir Anthony Van Dyck (English, 1599–1641) and early portraits by Sir Peter Lely (English, 1618–1680).²

Luke Sullivan worked on a small scale (one to two inches high) before the professionalization of British painting in the late 1760s, with the formation of drawing schools like William Shipley’s and the Royal Academy of the Arts. His subjects are presented with an unpretentious naturalism, as evidenced in the matter-of-fact gaze of the Nelson-Atkins sitter. This style earned him and other miniature painters practicing in the early 1760s the posthumous nickname “The Modest School.” Despite the challenges of painting in watercolor on ivory, Sullivan and other members of this so-called modest school succeeded in creating a new and distinct national style by the mid-eighteenth century, paving the way for the more daring works of future generations.

Notes

1. This refrain is repeated in many period accounts, including Joseph Strutt, A Biographical Dictionary; Containing an Historical Account of All the Engravers, from the Earliest Period of the Art of Engraving to the Present Time; and a Short List of Their Most Esteemed Works (London: J. Davis, 1786), 347.

2. See Aileen Ribeiro, “Some Evidence of the Influence of the Dress of the Seventeenth Century on Costume in Eighteenth-Century Female Portraiture,” Burlington Magazine 119, no. 897 (December 1977): 834–32.

With an unknown owner, by 1953 [1];

Purchased from the unknown owner’s sale, Objects of Vertu, Portrait Miniatures, Watches, Gold Boxes, Etc., Sotheby’s, London, November 30, 1953, lot 84, as A Lady, by Leggatt Brothers, London, probably on behalf of Mr. John W. (1905–2000) and Mrs. Martha Jane (1906–2011) Starr, Kansas City, MO, 1953–1958 [2];

Their gift to The Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art, Kansas City, MO, 1958;

Notes

[1] In the Sotheby’s November 30, 1953, sale, “Various Properties” sold lots 83–94.

[2] Described in the catalogue as “A well-painted Miniature of a Lady, by Luke Sullivan, signed and dated 1764, head and shoulders three-quarters dexter, head and gaze directed at spectator, in low-cut blue dress, 1 5/8 in.” The annotated catalogue for this sale is located at University of Missouri-Kansas City’s Miller Nichols Library. The annotations are most likely by Mr. or Mrs. Starr. Lot number 84 is circled and there is “£25” written in pen to the left. According to an attached price list, Leggatt bought lot 84 for £25. Archival research has shown that Leggatt Brothers served as purchasing agents for the Starrs. See correspondence between Betty Hogg and Martha Jane Starr, May 15 and June 3, 1950, Nelson-Atkins curatorial files.

The Starr Foundation Collection of Miniatures, The Royal Ontario Museum, Toronto, December 8, 1972–January 14, 1973, no cat., no. 47, as Unknown Lady.

Catalogue of Objects of Vertu, Portrait Miniatures, Watches, Gold Boxes, Etc. (London: Sotheby’s, November 30, 1953), 10, as 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. 47, p. 20, (repro.), as Unknown Lady.