John Smart, Portrait of a Woman, 1790

Chicago:

Blythe Sobol, “John Smart, Portrait of a Woman, 1790,” 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/10.37764/8322.5.1590.

MLA:

Sobol, Blythe. “John Smart, Portrait of a Woman, 1790,” 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: 10.37764/8322.5.1590.

See the artist’s biography in volume 4.

The young woman who sat for this portrait in 1790 was probably unmarried, as her hair, worn in loose curls past her shoulders, was a style typically favored by women or girls prior to marriage.¹ This miniature may have been commissioned on the event of her engagement. Her brown hair is fashionably accented with a white bandeau trimmed with ropes of pearls striped along the band. Several curling bangs are carefully arranged to frame her forehead.

The sitter’s relatively simple, monochromatic attire enables Smart to showcase his skill at depicting varying fabric textures and materials, from the glossy luminescence of the pearled bandeau to the soft, lightweight fabric of her gown and the stiff, sheer ruffles along her neckline, outlined in deft, winding strokes of white gouache. Smart places her lower in the picture plane than is typical of his practice and renders her pale pink sash with scratchy pink and gray angled strokes at the sides, evoking its satiny sheen by contrasting these hatch marks with a flat, sheer wash of color at center right, although the effect is somewhat awkward. In contrast, the moody sky background is frenetically hatched by Smart in shades of blue, pink, gray, and yellow, dramatically setting off the sitter’s girlish figure. Perhaps indicative of a shorter sitting time, the modeling and the sitter’s anatomy—particularly the low, boneless slope of her shoulder and arm—is not painted with Smart’s usual accuracy. While she remains unidentified, the sitter was probably the daughter of an Honourable East India Company official, poised for her debut in British colonial society.

Notes

1. Anne Hollander has discussed at length the erotic charge carried by women wearing their hair down “during the history of the West.” She writes, “Loose female hair was always a specifically sexual reference, the sign of female emotional looseness and sensual susceptibility, and a standard sexual invitation. . . . Like female sexual desire, loose hair in the past was a potent female attribute not correctly displayed in public. But respectable unmarried girls, just like the Virgin Mary, wore loose hair to suggest the power of absolute female chastity. . . . For most women, it was necessary to have long thick hair, so as to be seen to have sexuality, but to show it publicly under very strict control.” Anne Hollander, Sex and Suits: The Evolution of Modern Dress (London: Bloomsbury, 2016), 38.

John W. (1905–2000) and Martha Jane (1906–2011) Starr, Kansas City, MO, by 1965;

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

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

The Starr Foundation Collection of Miniatures, The Royal Ontario Museum, Toronto, December 8, 1972–January 14, 1973, no cat., no. 123, as Unknown Lady.

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 a Woman.

Ross E. Taggart, The Starr Collection of Miniatures in the William Rockhill Nelson Gallery (Kansas City, MO: Nelson Gallery-Atkins Museum, 1971), no. 137, p. 31, 48, (repro.), as Unknown Lady.