Portrait of Anne Law (née Towry), 1st Lady Ellenborough
John Linnell (British, 1792–1882)
c. 1821
- Medium
- watercolor on ivory heightened with gum arabic
- Classification
- Portrait Miniature
- Dimensions
- Framed: 23.4 x 20.7 cm (9 3/16 x 8 1/8 in.); Unframed: 11.3 x 8.5 cm (4 7/16 x 3 3/8 in.)
- Culture
- England, 19th century
- Museum
- Cleveland Museum of Art, Modern European Painting and Sculpture
- Credit line
- Dudley P. Allen Fund
- 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 Linnell was born and lived much of his young adulthood in Bloomsbury, where his father, James, made picture frames and restored paintings. As a boy the artist trained briefly with Benjamin West (1738–1820) and John Varley (1778–1842) before becoming a student at the Royal Academy from 1805 to 1812. Though primarily known for his landscapes, Linnell was also a prolific portraitist and executed miniatures during the first two decades of his career, learning the medium from his neighbor James Holmes (1770–1860). According to an early biographer, Linnell began painting miniatures around 1818 with a portrait of his wife. By 1823 he had executed a number of miniature commissions from aristocratic patrons, including Princess Sophia, facilitated by the praise of the society maven Lady Stafford. He painted his last known miniature on ivory in 1832. During the approximately fifteen years that the artist painted miniatures, he consistently charged between 10 and 50 guineas for a portrait. These fees corresponded less to the size of the ivory than to the degree of finish and elaboration of the composition. In this portrait Anne Law (née Towry), 1st Lady Ellenborough (c. 1769–1843), is…
