Portrait of a Woman (1790s): Art, History and Details

Portrait of a Woman (1790s) is in the Cleveland Museum of Art collection. The museum's creator attribution is Andrew Plimer (British, 1763–1837).

The work and its context

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

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.

Object facts

• Title: Portrait of a Woman
• Date: 1790s
• Creator attribution: Andrew Plimer (British, 1763–1837)
• Culture: England, 18th century
• Type: Portrait Miniature
• Technique: watercolor on ivory in a period gold frame
• Dimensions: Framed: 8.4 x 6.8 cm (3 5/16 x 2 11/16 in.); Sight: 7.1 x 6 cm (2 13/16 x 2 3/8 in.)
• Collection: P - British before 1800
• Department: European Painting and Sculpture
• Accession number: 1943.649

A detail from the museum

The miniature remains in its original gold frame, which has a curl of dark brown hair over blue glass on the back.

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.