Portrait of a Man (c. 1790): Art, History and Details

Portrait of a Man (c. 1790) is in the Cleveland Museum of Art collection. The museum's creator attribution is Richard Cosway (British, 1742–1821).

The work and its context

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

Painted during the early part of Richard Cosway’s mature career, this portrait of an unknown man exhibits the artist’s characteristic proportionality, with head enlarged in relation to the shoulders and eyes enlarged in relation to the rest of the face. The effect is to draw the viewer’s attention to the sitter’s eyes, which heightens the already intimate experience of looking at a miniature. This young sitter wears a high collar popular in the late 1780s and has powdered his hair, worn en queue rather than wearing a wig, which by 1790 was used primarily by older, conservative men. Measuring under 2 inches high, this miniature is modest in size for Cosway during this period, when the format of his miniatures expanded to 3 inches. Factors such as size, elaborateness of costume, and how much of the body was depicted all determined how much an artist would charge for a miniature. Smaller miniatures were obviously more portable and adaptable to being worn as jewelry.

Object facts

• Title: Portrait of a Man
• Date: c. 1790
• Creator attribution: Richard Cosway (British, 1742–1821)
• Culture: England, late 18th century
• Type: Portrait Miniature
• Technique: watercolor on ivory in a gold frame with blue and white enamel
• Dimensions: Framed: 5.9 x 5 cm (2 5/16 x 1 15/16 in.); Unframed: 5 x 4 cm (1 15/16 x 1 9/16 in.)
• Collection: P - British before 1800
• Department: European Painting and Sculpture
• Accession number: 1942.1137

A detail from the museum

In 1795 the English government began to tax hair powder, resulting in the rapid abandonment of both wigs and powdered hair.

Collection credit

The Edward B. Greene Collection

Further reading listed by the museum

• Cleveland Museum of Art. Portrait Miniatures ; The Edward B. Greene Collection. Cleveland, OH: The Cleveland Museum of Art, 1951.
• Cleveland Museum of Art, and Alan Chong. European & American Painting in the Cleveland Museum of Art: A Summary Catalogue. Cleveland, Ohio: Cleveland Museum of Art, 1993.
• Korkow, Cory, and Dario Robleto. Disembodied: Portrait Miniatures and Their Contemporary Relatives. 2013.

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.