Portrait of a Woman (c. 1775): Art, History and Details

Portrait of a Woman (c. 1775) is in the Cleveland Museum of Art collection. The museum's creator attribution is John I Smart (British, 1741–1811).

The work and its context

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

This portrait was assigned the historically colorful but fictitious title of “Anne of Denmark” at some point after memory of its true identity had been lost. Giving illustrious titles to portraits of unknown sitters was a popular strategy adopted by dealers during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, often applied to miniature portraits and, in particular, to Smart’s sketches of women. Only the sitter’s head and neck are drawn, and a low-necked dress is faintly suggested. Her head is turned to the left, and her brown hair is dressed high, with flat curls against the back of her head. A lightly drawn veil falls over the back of the hair and shoulders. The sitter’s sagging jaw line and the lines beneath her blue-green eyes suggest that she was painted as a mature woman. The sketch is generally faded, and the background is unpainted. The finished ivory miniature for which this drawing was presumably a preparatory sketch has not yet been discovered. The sitter’s identification has been based on a later inscription in graphite on the verso of the paper backing. When the paper backing was removed from the back of the drawing in 2011, an inscription in brown ink in the artist’s hand was discovered. The writing appears to be a fragment, created when the small rectangle containing the portrait was cut from a larger sheet. It reads, “to be set[?] in . . . / and put in a Black / Frame largest . . . / [G . . .’s?] Size.” Above this, “very dark brown hair” is written in graphite.

Object facts

• Title: Portrait of a Woman
• Date: c. 1775
• Creator attribution: John I Smart (British, 1741–1811)
• Culture: England, 18th century
• Type: Portrait Miniature
• Technique: gray and red wash over graphite, heightened with white gouache on laid paper
• Dimensions: Sheet: 5.4 x 4.7 cm (2 1/8 x 1 7/8 in.); Secondary Support: 5.3 x 4.8 cm (2 1/16 x 1 7/8 in.)
• Collection: DR - British
• Department: Drawings
• Accession number: 1997.82

A detail from the museum

Mrs. A. Dean Perry, who donated this drawing to CMA, is the granddaughter of one of the museum’s founding members, Jeptha Homer Wade II.

Collection credit

Bequest of Mrs. A. Dean Perry

Further reading listed by the museum

• Christie, Manson & Woods. Ancient & Modern Pictures and Miniature Portraits. 1928.
• Foskett, Daphne. John Smart: the Man and His Miniatures. [London]: Cory, Adams & Mackay, 1964.
• Korkow, Cory, and Jon L. Seydl. British Portrait Miniatures: The Cleveland Museum of Art. 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.