Beschreibung:

Attributed to Nathaniel Hone (1718-1784). Portrait of a lady, watercolour, heightened with bodycolour, on ivory, oval half-length portrait, half-profile to right, of a seated lady, wearing a purple gown and a diaphanous gold-decorated headdress veil, both embellished with strings of pearls, a bead necklace, pearl drop earrings, and a ruby bracelet, her left elbow resting on a red cloth-covered table and a partially obscured letter headed with the words 'My dear wife', ink notes on backing paper by Arthur Jaffé pertaining to attribution, unframed but glazed, 47 x 42mm (1.75 x 1.5ins), housed in an early 19th century oval black shagreen case lined with crimson velvet (Qty: 1) Provenance: Collection of Arthur Jaffé OBE (1880–1954), and thence by descent. International lawyer Arthur Jaffé was an eminent scholar and collector of miniature paintings. He was an authority on John Smart and spent many years researching the miniaturist, with the intention of writing a catalogue raisonné of the artist’s works. Although he died before the task could be completed, the body of work he had produced formed the basis of Daphne Foskett’s book, John Smart The Man and his Miniatures, published in 1964. Nathaniel Hone typically painted his female sitters in unstructured draped garments utilising strings of pearls as a decorative motif, as here. Several examples of his work can be seen in the V&A, and Sotheby's sold a watercolour portrait miniature of a lady by Hone in May 2020 not dissimilar in its style and technique to that offered here.