John Smart, Portrait of Elizabeth Maria Yates, 1761

Chicago:

Maggie Keenan, “John Smart, Portrait of Elizabeth Maria Yates, 1761,” 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/10.37764/8322.5.1508.

MLA:

Keenan, Maggie. “John Smart, Portrait of Elizabeth Maria Yates, 1761,” 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: 10.37764/8322.5.1508.

See the artist’s biography in volume 4.

The inscription on the case verso of John Smart’s Portrait of Mrs. Yates provides clues about her and her husband’s (Fig. 1, F65-41/3) identities. The faded ink inscription led to the discovery of a January 17, 1760, marriage license for the Reverend Richard Sutton Yates (1711–1789) and Elizabeth Maria Hennand (1730–1777) of St. James, Westminster.¹ Their identities are further solidified by Mrs. Yates’s burial on February 25, 1777, or “12 years before 1789” (as per the inscription) at St. Dunstan in the East, London.² Mrs. Yates’s portrait was passed down alongside her husband’s and presumably inscribed by a family member.

Smart painted Mrs. Yates in 1761, the same year she gave birth to her first child, Richard William Yates (1761–1805) (Fig. 2).³ At a time when women often died in childbirth, the portrait could serve as a visual record of the new or expecting mother or as a later gift to the child. The Rev. Yates was familiar with life’s transience: his first wife, Susanna Spooner (1722–1757), died shortly after they wed.⁴ Yates’s second wife, Elizabeth, was the daughter of Thomas and Prudence Hennand.⁵ They were married for seventeen years and had three children together.⁶

In her portrait, she wears a cream-colored bodice with a string of pearls across the front, which attaches to a blue pendant at her bosom. A similar blue jewel is affixed to her shoulder. Her hair is in a braided updo and is decorated with a row of pearls, mirroring her dress’s décor. Smart uses a dark teal color throughout her raven-black hair, complementing the gray and white palette of her husband’s portrait.

The clergyman’s miniature was painted in 1762, the same year that Smart first exhibited at the Society of Artists of Great Britain.⁷ Smart, then twenty-one, was a young artist venturing into the market alongside fellow artist and former classmate Richard Cosway (1742–1821). This early part of Smart’s career (1759–1765) can be described as his mask phase, when his sitters’ faces appear flat and dimensionless, lacking realistic proportions or lively complexions. In Mrs. Yates’s portrait, her jaundiced appearance mirrors the greenish tone of the background, a palette that recurs in many of Smart’s other 1760s portraits. Prominent blue undertones in the face are another feature of Smart’s early work; they are particularly prevalent in the Rev. Yates’s portrait. Smart depicts Yates in a gesturally painted wig, wearing a simple black coat befitting his ecclesiastic title. There are hints of skin-colored pigments, but overall, Yates’s face is flooded with blue: his eyebrows appear a brighter sapphire than the blue of his eyes.

Richard Sutton Yates entered Queen’s College, Oxford, in 1730, at the age of eighteen.⁸ He received his doctorate in divinity in 1750 and served as a curate, domestic chaplain, and, finally, rector of the town of Solihull for the last twenty years of his life.⁹ Yates died on January 19, 1789, his tomb describing him as “a truly good Christian.”¹⁰ His son eventually followed in his footsteps as rector of Solihull.¹¹

Notes

1. London and Surrey, England, Marriage Bonds and Allegations, 1597–1921, ref. DL/A/D/005/MS10091/103, digitized on ancestrylibrary.com.

2. London Church of England Parish Registers, ref. P69/Dun1/A/014/Ms07860/001, London Metropolitan Archives.

3. “Yates, Richard William, 1761–1805,” Online Catalogue for Westminster School’s Archive and Collections, ref. GB-2014-WSA-18790, accessed August 23, 2024, https://collections.westminster.org.uk/index.php/yates-richard-william-1761-1805.

4. They married on July 21, 1757. London Church of England Parish Registers, ref. P82/GEO1/015, London Metropolitan Archives. He is listed as a widower on his marriage license to Elizabeth Hennand; see n. 1. Susanna Yates most likely died the same year they were married. See “Susan Yeates,” November 2, 1757, burial record, London Church of England Parish Registers, ref. P82/Gis/A/04, London Metropolitan Archives.

5. The Registers of St. Dunstan in the East: London (London: Harleian Society, 1958), 53.

6. Their other children were Elizabeth Maria Yates (1764–1837) and Catherine Ann Yates (1765–1831); “Sutton Family Tree,” digitized on Ancestrylibrary.com, https://www.ancestrylibrary.com/family-tree/person/tree/184790846/person/402411431252/facts.

7. His exhibited portraits were, according to the catalogue, “His own portrait, in crayons, the first attempt. A miniature of a gentleman. Ditto of a Jew”; Algernon Graves, “SMART, John . . . Miniature Painter,” The Society of Artists of Great Britain 1760–1791 (London: George Bell and Sons, 1907), 235.

8. Vernon Bryan Crowther-Beynon, “Notes: A Journey to Scotland in 1730,” Notes and Queries (London: The Times Publishing Company, 1921), 9:161; A Catalogue of All Graduates in Divinity, Law, Medicine, Arts, and Music (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1851), 2:752.

9. Catalogue of All Graduates, 2:752. An asterisk next to Yates’s name denotes that he was a “grand compounder,” or a candidate at the University of Oxford who paid extra for his degree. Candidates who had a high level of income were required to do this. Yates served as domestic chaplain for the 4th Earl of Plymouth and, later, the Countess of Plymouth; “Yates, Richard Sutton (1736–1789),” The Clergy Database, person ID 21065, accessed August 23, 2024, https://blog.theclergydatabase.org.uk/jsp/persons/DisplayPerson.jsp?PersonID=21065.

10. “DIED,” Bath Chronicle and Weekly Gazette, January 29, 1789, 2; Robert Pemberton, Solihull and its Church (Exeter: William Pollard, 1905), 194.

11. Samson Lennard and Augustine Vincent, “SOLIHULL: White Marble Tablet,” The Visitacon of the County of Warwick Taken 1619 (Warwick: Henry T. Cook and Son, 1859), 23.

Probably commissioned by the sitter’s husband, Rev. Richard Sutton Yates (1711–1789), and the sitter, Elizabeth Maria Yates (née Hennand, 1730–1777), Westminster, England, 1761–1789;

By descent to their son, Rev. Richard William Yates (1761–1805), Warwickshire, 1789—1805;

By descent to his son, Captain Richard Barnardiston Yates (1801–1883), Warwickshire, 1805–1883;

Probably inherited by his wife, Mary Yates (née Pack, 1808–1898), Southfield House, Whatley, Somerset, 1883 [1];

By descent to their daughter, Ellen Flora Barnardiston Yates (1834–1922), Sussex, possibly by 1883–1922 [2];

By descent to her nephew, Vernon Bryan Crowther-Beynon (1865–1941), Somerset, 1922–at least 1926 [3];

Unknown owner, probably Crowther-Beynon’s wife, Mary Crowther-Beynon (née Giffard, 1857–1952), Somerset, by June 29, 1953 [4];

Purchased at the unknown owner’s sale, Objects of Art and Vertu, Miniatures, Glass Paperweights and Watches, Christie’s, London, June 29, 1953, lot 30, as Portraits of the Rev. Richard Sutton Yates and his Wife, by Leggatt Brothers, London, probably on behalf of Mr. John W. (1905–2000) and Mrs. Martha Jane (1906–2011) Starr, Kansas City, MO, 1953–1965 [5];

Their gift to the Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art, Kansas City, MO, 1965.

Notes

[1] Mary Yates (née Pack) may have given the pair of Smart portraits to her daughter Ellen Flora alongside her miniature by Sir William Charles Ross, Portrait of Miss Mary Pack (F71-29/4). The Ross miniature’s secondary inscription records that it was gifted to “my dear Flora” in “May 1883,” shortly after the death on April 30, 1883, of the sitter’s husband, Richard Barnardiston Yates. He left a substantial personal estate of £21,882 16s. 8d. to his widow, the former Miss Mary Pack. He died at Westfield in Beckenham, Kent, the home of their son-in-law and youngest daughter Gertrude Ann Barnardiston Crowther. Probate Registry; London, England; Calendar of the Grants of Probate and Letters of Administration made in the Probate Registries of the High Court of Justice in England, 615.

[2] Out of Mrs. Yates’s three children, Ellen Flora was the only one who remained unmarried in 1883 and still lived with her parents. She married the Reverend Frederick Hopkins on June 2, 1887. England, Select Marriages, 1538–1973, ref: item 5, p. 27; FHL film number 2147082.

[3] The portrait is reproduced in Basil Long, “John Smart, Miniature Painter,” Connoisseur 74 (April 1926): 197, which states that the miniature belongs to, “Mr. V. B. Crowther-Beynon.” The son of Gertrude Anne (née Barnardiston, 1838–1936) and Rev­er­end Sam­uel Bryan (1829–1910) Crow­ther-Bey­non, rec­tor of Bec­ken­ham, Kent, Vernon Bryan inherited the family miniatures after the death of his aunt on December 11, 1922. See probate dated February 8, 1923, Principal Probate Registry; London, England; Calendar of the Grants of Probate and Letters of Administration made in the Probate Registries of the High Court of Justice in England. The inheritors of the estate of Ellen Flora Barnardiston Hopkins are “Vernon Bryan Crowther-Beynon and Frederick Gardnor Hopkins esquires,” her nephew and stepson. Crowther-Beynon was a longtime member of the British Numismatic Society and the composer of the Christmas carol tune “Budapest.” J. Allen, “Obituaries: Mr. V. B. Crowther-Beynon,” British Numismatic Journal 24 (1942–1944): 57, https://www.britnumsoc.org/images/PDFs/24-57.png.

[2] According to the 1953 sales catalogue, “Different Properties” sold lots 19–45. Although Vernon Bryan Crowther-Beynon died in 1941, his wife Mary lived until 1952. It is possible she inherited the miniatures from her husband.

[3] The lot description states, “Portraits of the Rev. Richard Sutton Yates and his Wife, by John Smart, signed and dated 1761 and 1762, the former in black coat, vest and powdered wig, the latter in décolleté pink dress—oval, 1 1/4 in. high. Illustrated and described by Basil Long, ‘The Connoisseur,’ April, 1926.” The prior lot is William Charles Ross’s portrait of Mary Pack, who was Ellen Flora Barnardiston Yates’s mother. This suggests that lots 29 and 30 were from the same collection and that this was posthumous sale of Mary Crowther-Beynon.

According to Art Prices Current, 30, August 1952–July 1953 (London: Art Trade Press, 1953), Leggatt bought lot 30 for £42. 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.

John Smart—Miniaturist: 1741/2–1811, The Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art, Kansas City, MO, December 9, 1965–January 2, 1966, no cat., as Mrs. Yates.

The Starr Foundation Collection of Miniatures, The Royal Ontario Museum, Toronto, December 8, 1972–January 14, 1973, no cat., no. 86, as Mrs. Yates.

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 Elizabeth Maria Yates.

Basil Long, “John Smart, Miniature Painter,” Connoisseur 74 (April 1926): 197, (repro.), as Mrs. Yates.

Daphne Foskett, John Smart: The Man and His Miniatures (New York: October House, 1964), 77, as Mrs. Yates.

Daphne Foskett, “Miniatures by John Smart,” Antiques 90, no. 3 (September 1966): 354, (repro.), as Mrs. Yates.

Ross E. Taggart, The Starr Collection of Miniatures in the William Rockhill Nelson Gallery (Kansas City, MO: Nelson Gallery-Atkins Museum, 1971), no. 86, p. 36 (repro.), as Mrs. Yates.

Emma Rutherford and Lawrence Hendra, John Smart: A Genius Magnified (London: Philip Mould, 2014), 108n4.