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Portrait of a Man
Nathaniel Plimer (British, 1757–1822)
c. 1795
- Medium
- watercolor on ivory in a period gold and hair frame
- Classification
- Portrait Miniature
- Dimensions
- Framed: 9.2 x 7.7 cm (3 5/8 x 3 1/16 in.); Sight: 6.7 x 5.3 cm (2 5/8 x 2 1/16 in.)
- Culture
- England, 18th century
- Museum
- Cleveland Museum of Art, European Painting and Sculpture
- Credit line
- The Edward B. Greene Collection
- Rights
- Public domain (CC0), as the museum states it.
- Who can see it
- Tweens profiles and older: its subjects are known and suit older children. How works are placed
View at the Cleveland Museum of Art
About this work
The sitter's powdered hair is tied with a dark bow below the shoulders. He has gray eyes and wears a greenish-gray coat, white shirt, and cravat tied in a bow under his chin. The background is very pale, with ivory ground visible, but faintly light blue close to the head. Among the hallmarks of Nathaniel Plimer’s technique was the use of delicate stippling for the shadows of the face and the application of individual dots of paint to create the lower eyelashes. This portrait is probably the pendant to 1941.562.2. The female portrait is slightly larger than the male, and both date from c. 1795, the date at which a British man would have worn his hair powdered and his cravat tied in a bow. It is impossible to know for certain if these unidentified sitters were married, but the fact that they are housed in identical frames, which date from the same period as the paintings, suggests that they are a pair. Although husbands and wives often commissioned portraits in miniature simultaneously, the pairs were frequently divided over time through inheritance, loss, breakage, or independent sale. Both miniatures are housed in identical, elaborate period gold frames with braided hairwork. The…
