Adams Important Irish Art 23rd March 2016 : You can Download a PDF Version from the Bottom Menu Down Arrow Icon

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Bust Length
Enamel, 4.3 x 3.7cm
Signed and Dated 1750. Set within a gold mount and a triform tortoise shell pannelled snuff box with basket weave panels.
This beautifully painted portrait of an unknown young lady shows her in simple country dress. She wears a white lace ruff at her neck which is tied up
with a yellow ribbon. It matches the ribbon on her linen cap which is also edged with lace. The lacing across the stomacher, also in yellow, is another
reference to rustic or ‘peasant’ dress. The sitter wears a pearl drop earring which adds to the overall elegance of the portrait. The rural simplicity of
the dress is a form of fanciful costume. It was a popular form of fancy dress for portraiture and for attending masquerade balls in the mid-eighteenth
century. Nathaniel Hone several enamel portraits in fanciful dress and a comparable portrait of a woman in masquerade costume, also dated 1750, is
in the collection of the Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge.
Miniature portraits painted on enamel, such as this one, were intimate, private images that recorded an accurate likeness of the sitter. They were also
decorative ornamental objects, part of fashionable dress and personal adornment. Enamels were either worn as jewellery, in lockets or brooches, or
set into gold boxes such as snuff boxes, or as in this case, the portrait is set into an elaborate gold-mounted tortoise-shell bonbonniere. The simplicity
of the portrait contrasts with the complex shape of the tortoise-shell box which is an unusual hexagonal shape with alternating plain and decorated
scalloped sides. During the eighteenth century a bonbonniere was a highly desirable luxury object. These expensive accessories were essentially
decorative but could be put to practical use. They were used to contain sweets, or other types of confectionary, such as sweetmeats or cachous pills
which were used to sweeten the breath.
The artist Nathaniel Hone was born in Dublin but spent most of his career working in London. He occupies a significant place in the history of Irish
and English miniature portrait painting. After the decline of Christian Friedrich Zincke, during the early 1740s, Hone succeeded him as the foremost
enamellist. Hone did numerous enamel miniature portraits during the 1750s but he is best remembered as an oil painter, founder member of the
Royal Academy and for his disputes with Sir Joshua Reynolds. His direct naturalistic approach to painting miniature portraits owed much to Hogarth
and Hudson’s work and they predict his later development as a portraitist in oils.
Dr Paul Caffrey
€ 3,000 - 5,000