Portrait of a Man (c. 1800): Art, History and Details

Portrait of a Man (c. 1800) is in the Cleveland Museum of Art collection. The museum's creator attribution is George Engleheart (British, 1752–1829).

The work and its context

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

This work dates to around 1800, when George Engleheart was in the mature stage of his career. The sitter wears a blue coat with brass buttons over a yellow waistcoat and high white collar with ruffles. The initials W.A. on the back of the case probably identify the sitter, but Engleheart’s fee book records only his sitter’s surname in most instances, so it is impossible to determine if this portrait is among those numerous sitters with an A surname. The meticulous construction of the elaborate case and the nature of its components—gold, enamel, and diamonds—indicates that it is probably original. The gold initials on the bordered, blue enamel back are encircled with braided brown hair. The twenty-four brilliant-cut diamonds are genuine, though paste diamonds were becoming more widely available during this period. When this work entered Cleveland’s collection in the 1940s, the cost of reproducing the frame was noted in curatorial records to be 20,000 to 25,000 francs, according to the dealer Leo Schidlof. It is the only miniature from the Greene collection whose setting was evaluated in such a way.

Object facts

• Title: Portrait of a Man
• Date: c. 1800
• Creator attribution: George Engleheart (British, 1752–1829)
• Culture: England, 18th century
• Type: Portrait Miniature
• Technique: watercolor on ivory, in a later gold, enamel, and diamond frame
• Dimensions: Framed: 8.7 x 7.4 cm (3 7/16 x 2 15/16 in.); Unframed: 7.7 x 6.2 cm (3 1/16 x 2 7/16 in.)
• Collection: Mod Euro - Painting 1800-1960
• Department: Modern European Painting and Sculpture
• Accession number: 1941.556

A detail from the museum

Braided brown hair is glazed on the back of this miniature.

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: 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.