1795
unspecified
From the collection of Cleveland Museum of Art
Dominant colour
Portrait of a Man and Portrait of a Woman (pair) is a 1795 unspecified by Nathaniel Plimer, a British Romanticism work, held at Cleveland Museum of Art.
A man and a woman face us in matching oval frames. His hair is powdered white, tied in a black bow. Her dress is white too, with a blue sash and tiny pearls in her hair. Both sit against a pale, almost empty background. Plimer painted these miniatures with tiny dots—stippling—for shadows and even the lashes on their lower lids. The effect is soft, like a photograph just coming into focus. These weren’t meant to hang on a wall; they were keepsakes, small enough to carry. If you like these, look up technique: sfumato—it’s another way artists blurred edges to make faces feel alive.
The man's powdered hair is tied with a dark bow below the shoulders. He has gray eyes and wears a greenish-gray coat, white shirt, and cravat tied in a bow under his chin. The background is very pale, with ivory ground visible, but faintly light blue close to the head. Among the hallmarks of Nathaniel Plimer’s technique was the use of delicate stippling for the shadows of the face and the application of individual dots of paint to create the lower lid eyelashes. The woman wears a wide, white ribbon bandeau in her powdered, curly hair, which falls to her shoulders. She has blue eyes and dark…
They are both unsigned, as was typical for Plimer’s works during this period.
Read the full account in the museum source.
Nathaniel Plimer (1757–1822) was an English miniature portrait painter.
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