Mrs. Sarah Siddons (1785): Art, History and Details

Mrs. Sarah Siddons (1785) is in the Cleveland Museum of Art collection. The museum's creator attribution is Thomas Gainsborough (British, 1727–1788).

The work and its context

The museum's open-access catalogue describes the work:

Although Thomas Gainsborough produced about a thousand portraits in oil, the artist typically worked directly on the canvas rather than making preparatory drawings of his sitters. This study, so closely related to the artist’s finished painting of the famous actress Mrs. Sarah Siddons, is highly unusual. One scholar has hypothesized that because the portrait was not made on commission but conceived for an exhibition in his studio, Gainsborough may have had only a single sitting with the celebrated actress, and knew he would he would have to rely on the drawing as a basis for the finished work.

Object facts

• Title: Mrs. Sarah Siddons
• Date: 1785
• Creator attribution: Thomas Gainsborough (British, 1727–1788)
• Culture: England, 18th century
• Type: Drawing
• Technique: black chalk with extensive stump work with traces of white gouache
• Dimensions: Sheet: 46.8 x 35.3 cm (18 7/16 x 13 7/8 in.)
• Collection: DR - British
• Department: Drawings
• Accession number: 1976.6

A detail from the museum

The sitter for this portrait, Sarah Siddons, was the subject of a competition between Thomas Gainsborough and his rival Sir Joshua Reynolds, who exhibited a portrait of the actress at the Royal Academy the year before this drawing was made.

Collection credit

John L. Severance Fund

Further reading listed by the museum

• Reid, Andrew T. The Collection of Pictures Formed by Andrew T. Reid of Auchterarder. Glasgow: Andrew T. Reid, 1933.
• Hayes, John. The Drawings of Thomas Gainsborough. New Haven: Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art by Yale University Press, 1971.
• The Cleveland Museum of Art. Handbook of the Cleveland Museum of Art/1978. Cleveland, OH: The Cleveland Museum of Art, 1978.

View the collection record

See the museum's photographs and full catalogue entry. Catalogue text is reproduced from the Cleveland Museum of Art's open-access data, with HTML formatting removed. This object and its supplied image are designated CC0.