Portrait of Lady Grace Anna Newenham (1784): Art, History and Details

Portrait of Lady Grace Anna Newenham (1784) is in the Cleveland Museum of Art collection. The museum's creator attribution is Horace Hone (British, 1756–1825).

The work and its context

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

Lady Grace Anna Newenham (née Burton, 1725–1807) was the wife of Sir Edward Newenham (1734–1814), a prominent radical Protestant Irish politician and MP for Dublin, whom she married in 1754 at St. Thomas in Dublin. Lady Newenham herself came from a highly influential family with deep Whig political roots in Dublin. This miniature was painted in 1784, when she was nearly 60 years old and had been married for 30 years. This period found her husband, Edward, deeply in debt, going to great lengths to secure employment for his children, and planning a trip to America. While the former conditions would not encourage an artistic expenditure, the latter might have provided the impetus for this portrait to be commissioned. Lady Newenham wears a gray wrap with a high white collar and a white low-neck dress. Her costume is summarily painted with quick strokes, and the ivory ground is allowed to show through particularly at her breast, enhancing the delicacy of her complexion. She is not, however, overly flattered as she would have been in the hands of a miniature painter like Richard Cosway (1742–1821). Instead, Horace Hone gently described her sagging jaw line as well as the wrinkles and moles on her face. She has the eyes of an older woman, beneath which Hone’s trademark glowing pink cheeks seem almost to suggest cosmetics. The texture of her lightly powdered brown hair that falls to her shoulders is delineated by Hone’s technique of scraping the surface of the watercolor paint with extremely fine lines that reflect light and suggest individual strands of hair. The background is a muddy gray sky with a hint of pale blue. Among the 18 children that Lady Newenham gave birth to over the course of two decades, six died at a young age. Lady Newenham wears a miniature on her breast, possibly depicting one of the children she lost. The back of the miniature contains plaited hair under glass, bordered with an elaborate woven hair “belt,” a typically Irish form of hairwork.

Object facts

• Title: Portrait of Lady Grace Anna Newenham
• Date: 1784
• Creator attribution: Horace Hone (British, 1756–1825)
• Culture: England, 18th century
• Type: Portrait Miniature
• Technique: watercolor on ivory
• Dimensions: Framed: 9 x 7.6 cm (3 9/16 x 3 in.); Sight: 7.6 x 6 cm (3 x 2 3/8 in.)
• Collection: P - British before 1800
• Department: European Painting and Sculpture
• Accession number: 1942.1144

A detail from the museum

Human hair was frequently incorporated into miniatures and was especially appropriate for mourning miniatures because it transformed the object into a kind of reliquary.

Collection credit

The Edward B. Greene Collection

Further reading listed by the museum

• Metropolitan Museum of Art (New York, N.Y.). Four Centuries of Miniature Painting: A Special Exhibition, Including Loans from Museums and Private Collections and Examples from the Museum's Own Collection, Commemorating the 50th Anniversary of the American Society of Miniature Painters, January 19 - March 19, 1950. 1950. .
• 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.

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.