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Portrait of a Young Man
Andrew Plimer (British, 1763–1837)
c. 1805
- Medium
- watercolor on ivory in original gold frame
- Classification
- Portrait Miniature
- Dimensions
- Framed: 8.3 x 7 cm (3 1/4 x 2 3/4 in.); Unframed: 7.9 x 6.5 cm (3 1/8 x 2 9/16 in.)
- Culture
- England, 19th century
- Museum
- Cleveland Museum of Art, Modern 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
This miniature is an extremely fi ne example of Andrew Plimer’s mature work. Painted around 1805, the artist eschews the Richard Cosway-esque blue sky background he so often adopted for an elaborate network of crosshatching over a rich brown ground, into which the sitter almost dissolves. He has gray eyes and light brown hair and wears a grayish-brown coat and a white collar. His gaze firmly meets that of the viewer. The painting is housed in its original gold frame, the verso of which has a curl of light brown hair fastened with a band of pearls on white opalescent glass under clear glass. There is also a paper label of unknown origin at the top, on which is written “226.” The sitter’s hair is worn à l’antique (hair cut short and worn in curls, especially around the forehead), a style sported by men after the turn of the century that harks back to the coiffures of statesmen of ancient Rome.1 In addition, this sitter’s brown hair is completely unpowdered, as was fashionable among young men at the turn of the century. The hair is beautifully delineated by small, undulating parallel lines. This sitter has been traditionally identified as a member of the famous Baring banking…
