1805
unspecified
From the collection of Cleveland Museum of Art
Dominant colour
Portrait of a Young Man is a 1805 unspecified by Andrew Plimer, a British Romanticism work, held at Cleveland Museum of Art.
A young man looks straight at you. His light brown hair is neatly combed, and he wears a plain gray-brown coat with a crisp white collar. The background isn’t sky—it’s dark brown, filled with tiny crossed lines that almost swallow his edges. Plimer usually painted bright blue skies behind his sitters. Here, he tried something different: a dense, dark ground that makes the face stand out. The gold frame is original, with a hidden note on the back—like a secret just for the owner. To see more small portraits like this, look up Andrew Plimer (British, 1763–1837).
This miniature is an extremely fi ne example of Andrew Plimer’s mature work. Painted around 1805, the artist eschews the Richard Cosway-esque blue sky background he so often adopted for an elaborate network of crosshatching over a rich brown ground, into which the sitter almost dissolves. He has gray eyes and light brown hair and wears a grayish-brown coat and a white collar. His gaze firmly meets that of the viewer. The painting is housed in its original gold frame, the verso of which has a curl of light brown hair fastened with a band of pearls on white opalescent glass under clear glass.…
This sitter has been traditionally identified as a member of the famous Baring banking family although which brother we are unsure.
Read the full account in the museum source.
Andrew Plimer (baptized 29 December 1763 – 29 January 1837) was a British artist, whose brother was Nathaniel Plimer, also a painter of miniatures.
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