The Cleveland Museum of Art

Collection Online as of March 26, 2024

Portrait of Lady Grace Anna Newenham

Portrait of Lady Grace Anna Newenham

1784
(British, 1756–1825)
Framed: 9 x 7.6 cm (3 9/16 x 3 in.); Sight: 7.6 x 6 cm (3 x 2 3/8 in.)
Location: not on view

Did You Know?

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

Description

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 sixty years old and had been married for thirty 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, over-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 fi ne 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 eighteen children that Lady Newenham bore 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.
  • Before 1929
    George William Panter (d. 1929), Ireland
    -1929
    (Leo Schidlof, (1886-1966) Paris, France, sold to Edward B. Greene)
    1929-1942
    Edward B. Greene (1878-1957), Cleveland, OH, gifted to the Cleveland Museum of Art
    1942
    The Cleveland Museum of Art, Cleveland, OH
  • 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. . p. 6.
    Cleveland Museum of Art. Portrait Miniatures ; The Edward B. Greene Collection. Cleveland, OH: The Cleveland Museum of Art, 1951. Reproduced: p. 27, no 18, pl. XIX archive.org
    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. p. 292
    Korkow, Cory, and Dario Robleto. Disembodied: Portrait Miniatures and Their Contemporary Relatives. 2013. Mentioned: p. 84
    Korkow, Cory, and Jon L. Seydl. British Portrait Miniatures: The Cleveland Museum of Art. 2013. Cat. no. 51, pp. 209-211
    Cleveland Museum of Art. Cleveland Art: The Cleveland Museum of Art Members Magazine. Vol. 53 no. 06, November/December 2013 Mentioned & reproduced: p. 6-7 archive.org
  • Disembodied: Portrait Minatures and their Contemporary Relatives. The Cleveland Museum of Art, Cleveland, OH (organizer) (November 10, 2013-February 16, 2014).
    Main Gallery Rotation (Gallery 202), The Cleveland Museum of Art, Cleveland, OH (June 20, 2008 - September 22, 2008). [Verso on display].
    Intimate Images: Portrait Miniatures from Europe and America. The Cleveland Museum of Art, Cleveland, OH (organizer) (March 26-October 17, 1993).
    Portraiture: The Image of the Individual. The Cleveland Museum of Art, Cleveland, OH (organizer) (November 22, 1983-January 22, 1984).
    Four Centuries of Miniature Painting. The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, NY (organizer) (January 18-March 19, 1950).
  • {{cite web|title=Portrait of Lady Grace Anna Newenham|url=false|author=Horace Hone|year=1784|access-date=26 March 2024|publisher=Cleveland Museum of Art}}

Source URL:

https://www.clevelandart.org/art/1942.1144