Portrait of Miss Mary Tadman

About this work

Mary Tadman’s head and shoulders face right. Her eyes are brown, and she wears a necklace of small pearls and a drop pearl earring. She wears her dark brown hair high in a classically inspired bun, with a braid across the hairline and many curls falling over her forehead and in front of her ears. Her white dress is delicately embroidered at the edges along the bust and is tied at the empire style waist, with a small pin fastened to the front. The translucent white sleeves worn beneath the dress are probably made of muslin and detachable, since they do not appear in the ivory version of the portrait. Detachable sleeves were popular during the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries and enabled a dress to function as day- and eveningwear. The nature of this work as a finished drawing rather than exclusively a preparatory sketch for a miniature on ivory is evident in the degree of finish of the sitter’s clothing, heightened with white gouache and painted to the elaborated penciled oval border. In December 1809, the year this drawing was executed, Mary Tadman (1786–1862) married Major William Jolliffe Eldridge. He died in 1818 in Poona, India, and three years later, his widow…