Cleveland Museum of Art

Portrait of a Woman

Andrew Plimer

Date

1790s

Medium

watercolor on ivory in a period gold frame

Culture

England, 18th century

Department

European Painting and Sculpture

Institution

Cleveland Museum of Art

This sitter has curly hair falling around her neck and into which are woven two pearl ornaments. She wears a plain, low-neck white dress. Usually made of lightweight cotton muslin and high-waisted, this type of dress became popular at the end of the eighteenth century and was intended to refer to classical antiquity. Similar garments are worn by many of the female sitters depicted by Andrew Plimer during this period. The background is a blue-gray sky with prominent gray crosshatching. This miniature is an accomplished example of Plimer’s work, with the sitter’s features soft but individualized and not given over to the doll-like caricature that appears in the artist’s other portraits of this date. The work is unsigned, as was typical for Plimer at this time. The miniature remains in its original gold frame, which has a curl of dark brown hair over blue glass on the back.

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