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

Portrait of a Woman (late 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 unknown sitter has greenish-gray eyes and curly brown hair falling to the back of her neck. She wears a white lace-bordered mob cap with a bow at the top and ruffle under the chin. Her brown dress of dotted Swiss cotton has a narrow white collar. Handwoven during this period, dotted Swiss was a delicate fabric used for summer dresses. Both the Swiss dot gown and the mob cap give the sitter a casual, country air at odds with the approaching vogue for dressing in a style more classically inspired. The background sky is light blue and gray, with crosshatching increasingly worked increasingly close to the figure. The color palette is confined to browns and muddy blues. This miniature, painted close to 1800, is a charming example of Andrew Plimer’s doll aesthetic, seen in the sitter’s round face, tiny mouth, and large eyes. Plimer was an extremely prolific artist, which helps account for the fact that many of his female sitters look alike.

Object facts

• Title: Portrait of a Woman
• Date: late 1790s
• Creator attribution: Andrew Plimer (British, 1763–1837)
• Culture: England, 18th -19th century
• Type: Portrait Miniature
• Technique: watercolor on ivory in a gold frame with glazed reverse
• Dimensions: Framed: 8.5 x 7.2 cm (3 3/8 x 2 13/16 in.); Sight: 8 x 6.5 cm (3 1/8 x 2 9/16 in.)
• Collection: P - British before 1800
• Department: European Painting and Sculpture
• Accession number: 1941.561

A detail from the museum

A sticker attached to the back says “Countess Orford"; however, the sitter cannot be her since the Earl of Orford died without issue in 1797 and the title expired with his death.

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.