Beauty Revealed

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Miniature of a Woman's Breasts, 2006.235.74
Beauty Revealed
Sarah Goodridge , 1828
Watercolor on ivory
6.7 x 8 cm
Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York City , United States

Beauty Revealed (German about revealing beauty ) is a self-portrait of Sarah Goodridge from the year 1828, designed as a miniature in watercolor technique on Ivory . The picture shows the artist's bare breasts framed by pale draped cloth. The 6.7 × 8 cm picture - originally on a paper carrier - is in a modern frame. Goodridge, who painted the picture when she was forty years old, portrays her breasts pale, balanced and lively through a harmony of light, color and balance. The surrounding cloth focuses the gaze and hides the surrounding body.

Goodridge gifted the portrait to statesman Daniel Webster , who was her frequent model and possibly her lover, after his wife died. Maybe she wanted to get him to marry. Webster married another woman, but the painting remained in the family's possession until the 1980s, when it was auctioned by Christie's to Gloria and Richard Manney in 1981 . The couple donated their miniature collection including Beauty Revealed to the Metropolitan Museum of Art in 2006 .

Description and context

Beauty Revealed is a self-portrait by Sarah Goodridge (1788-1853), showing her bare breasts, pink nipples and a beauty mark. They are shown in a gradient that creates a three-dimensional effect. Although Goodridge painted the picture at the age of forty, her breasts appear in idealized reality, according to art critic Chris Packard, because of their youthfulness, their balance, their paleness and buoyancy . The breasts are surrounded by a swirl of pale cloth that reflects the light.

The 6.7 × 8 cm picture is in a case and was originally mounted on paper that was labeled "1828" on the reverse. The work is a watercolor on ivory, thin enough to be translucent and thus make the breasts “glow”. This medium was typical of American miniatures, but in this case it also served as a parable for the meat presented on it.

Beauty Revealed was completed during a period of popularity for portrait miniatures , a medium that was introduced to the United States in the 18th century. At the time of Goodridge's portrait, miniatures were growing in complexity and vibrancy. Heilbrunn's timeline of art history describes Beauty Revealed as a game with the eye miniatures (also called lovers' eyes , small images of the eyes of a loved one or a child that express a bond with them), which were popular in England and France, but not in the United States. These images made it possible to carry a memento of a loved one with you without revealing their identity.

history

Miniature Painting, Sarah Goodridge Self Portrait.jpg
Sarah Goodridge, 1830
Daniel Webster (1825) by Sarah Goodridge.jpg
Daniel Webster, 1825


Both portraits of Goodridge

Goodridge was a prolific Boston- based miniature portrait painter who studied with Gilbert Stuart and Elkanah Tisdale . She was long associated with Daniel Webster , a politician who began his career as a Senator from Massachusetts in 1827. Webster sent her over forty letters between 1827 and 1851. His greetings became more and more confidential, the last, contrary to his character, were addressed to “My dear, good friend”. During this time she painted him a dozen times and visited him at least twice in Washington, DC , the first time in 1828 after the death of his first wife, then in 1841–42 when Webster had separated from his second wife.

Goodridge completed Beauty Revealed in 1828, presumably using a mirror. Various works have been suggested as inspiration, including John Vanderlyn's The Sleeping Ariadne on Naxos and Horatio Greenough's sculpture Venus Victrix . Goodridge sent the portrait to Webster when he was just widowed, and due to its small size it was probably intended for his eyes only. American art critic John Updike suggested that she wanted to offer herself to Webster; In his view, the bare breasts - in their ivory charm and with their tenderly pimped nipples - seem to say: “We are easy to get.” ( We are yours for the taking, in all our ivory loveliness, with our tenderly stippled nipples. ) However, Webster eventually marries a wealthier woman.

After Webster's death, Beauty Revealed, along with another self-portrait, was inherited through Goodridge's family who believed they were related. In 1981, the painting was auctioned at Christie's for a list price of US $ 15,000, later that year went through the Alexander Gallery in New York and was then acquired by collectors Gloria and Richard Manney. The couple was Beauty Revealed in 1991 in the exhibition Tokens of Affection: The Portrait Miniature in America , in the Metropolitan Museum of Art (Met) in New York, the National Museum of American Art in Washington, DC and the Art Institute of Chicago has shown .

The Manneys left Beauty Revealed, along with over three hundred other miniatures, to the Met in 2006. Carrie Rebora Barratt and Lori Zabar of the Met describe the portrait as the most overwhelming of the weird and wonderful miniatures by minor artists in the collection. Two years later, Beauty Revealed was included in the retrospective The Philippe de Montebello Years: Curators Celebrate Three Decades of Acquisitions , which presented the work of the outgoing Met director Philippe de Montebello . Holland Cotter of The New York Times highlighted the portrait as remarkable . In 2009, writers Jane Kamensky and Jill Lepore used Beauty Revealed and other paintings, such as John Singleton Copley's Boy with a Squirrel , as the inspiration for their novel Blindspot . In 2014, the Met website stated that the painting was not on display.

analysis

Art historian Dale Johnson described Beauty Revealed as strikingly realistic . It proves Goodridge's ability to present light and shadow in a nuanced manner. She describes the dots and hatching used as delicate. In 2012, Randall L. Holton and Charles A. Gilday wrote in Antiques that the image continued to evoke a shudder of erotic possibility.

Packard wrote that Beauty Revealed was a visual synecdoche that represented the wholeness of Goodridge through her breasts. In contrast to the guilt-laden 1845 self-portrait and the un-erotic one from 1830, this depicts Goodridge and her need for attention. The cloth marks a performance (like the curtains in Vaudeville ), the viewer's gaze is focused on the breasts, while the rest of the body is obliterated and is abstracted. This challenges the assumptions and stereotypes of the prudish, home-bound woman of the 19th century.

literature

  • Carrie Rebora Barratt, Lori Zabar: American portrait miniatures in the Metropolitan Museum of Art . Ed .: Metropolitan Museum of Art. Metropolitan Museum of Art, Yale University Press, New York / New Haven 2010, ISBN 978-0-300-14895-4 , pp. 8-9 ( books.google.co.id ).
  • Dale T. Johnson: American Portrait Miniatures in the Manney Collection . Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York 1990, ISBN 0-87099-598-7 , pp. 126-127 ( books.google.co.id ).
  • John Frederick Walker: Ivory's Ghosts. The White Gold of History and the Fate of Elephants . Grove Press / Atlantic Monthly Press, New York 2010, ISBN 978-1-55584-913-9 , pp. 94 ( books.google.co.id ).
  • John Updike: The Revealed and the Concealed: An Extraordinary Love Token Holds the Key to America's Ambivalent Relationship with the Nude . In: Art and Antiques . tape February 15 , 1993, p. 70-76 .

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ a b c d e f g h i j k Chris Packard: Self-Fashioning in Sarah Goodridge's Self-Portraits Archived from the original on September 27, 2014. In: American Antiquarian Society (ed.): Common-place . 4, No. 1, October 2003, ISSN  1544-824X . Retrieved March 30, 2013.
  2. ↑ a b Holland Citter: A Banquet of World Art, 30 Years in the Making . In: The New York Times , October 23, 2008. Archived from the original on September 27, 2014. Retrieved March 31, 2013. 
  3. ↑ a b c d e f Walker: Ivory's Ghosts. The White Gold of History and the Fate of Elephants. 2009, p. 94.
  4. ^ A b c Johnson: American Portrait Miniatures in the Manney Collection. 1990, p. 126.
  5. ↑ a b c d Beauty Revealed . Metropolitan Museum of Art. Archived from the original on September 27, 2014. Retrieved on September 27, 2014.
  6. ^ A b Carrie Rebora Barratt: American Portrait Miniatures of the Nineteenth Century . Metropolitan Museum of Art. Archived from the original on September 27, 2014. Retrieved on September 27, 2014.
  7. ↑ a b c d Johnson: American Portrait Miniatures in the Manney Collection. 1990, p. 127.
  8. ↑ a b Randall L. Holton, Charles A. Gilday: Sarah Goodrich: Mapping places in the heart . In: Antiques , November – December 2012. Archived from the original on September 27, 2014. Retrieved on September 27, 2014. 
  9. ↑ Christie's . In: International Art Market . 21, New York, 1981, ISSN  0020-5931 , p. 219.
  10. ↑ a b Lita Solis-Cohen: American portrait miniatures on view in Washington museum . In: The Baltimore Sun , April 21, 1991. Archived from the original on October 5, 2014. Retrieved October 5, 2014. 
  11. ^ Johnson: American Portrait Miniatures in the Manney Collection. 1990, p. 4, 127. ( books.google.co.id )
  12. ↑ Jane Kamensky and Jill Lepore: Facts and Fictions in Revolutionary Boston. Archived from the original on September 27, 2014. In: American Antiquarian Society (Eds.): Common-place . 9, No. 3, September. Retrieved September 27, 2014.
  13. ^ Beauty Revealed . Metropolitan Museum of Art. Archived from the original on October 4, 2014. Retrieved on October 4, 2014.