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Portrait of Constantine Phipps
John I Smart (British, 1741–1811)
1770
- Medium
- watercolor on ivory in a later gold and woven hair bracelet
- Classification
- Portrait Miniature
- Dimensions
- Framed: 4.6 x 4.1 cm (1 13/16 x 1 5/8 in.); Unframed: 3.8 x 3.2 cm (1 1/2 x 1 1/4 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
John Smart painted the British gentleman Constantine Phipps (1746–1797) at the age of twenty-four, executing this portrait in 1770, the year following the death of the sitter’s father, Constantine Phipps (1710?–1769), and preceding his marriage to Elizabeth Tierney (d. 1832). Phipps the younger was the second son of a landowner and lived throughout England and France. In 1788 he moved his family to Caen, Normandy, hoping to educate his ten (eventually thirteen) children more economically. Phipps and his wife returned to England in 1792 to attend their daughter’s wedding. The escalating conflict between France and England prevented Phipps from returning to France where he had left eight children behind. Unfortunately, he did not see them before his death five years later. The portrait represents Phipps’s nearly full face. He has light brown eyes and natural brown hair worn en queue. He wears a green coat with a small collar, a white waistcoat embroidered with gold, and a high, white stock collar. Phipps is depicted against an olive-gray background. This early work by Smart already exhibits hallmarks of the artist’s style, such as the plain, gray background, the sitter’s colorful…
