Portrait of a Man
Framed: 3 1/2 × 2 3/4 × 1/8 inches (8.89 × 6.99 × 0.32 cm)
- 124
Unknown owner, by December 19, 1949 [1];
Purchased from the unknown owner’s sale, Catalogue of Objects of Art and Vertu, Miniatures, Coins, and Glass Paperweights, Christie, Manson, and Woods, London, December 19, 1949, lot 108, as Portrait of a Gentleman, by Leggatt Brothers, London, probably on behalf of Mr. John W. (1905–2000) and Mrs. Martha Jane (1906–2011) Starr, Kansas City, MO, by 1949–1958 [2];
Their gift to The Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art, Kansas City, MO, 1958.
Notes:
[1] In the Christie’s December 19, 1949 sale, “Different Properties” sold lots 98–119.
[2] The annotated catalogue for this sale is located at the University of Missouri-Kansas City, Miller Nichols Library. According to Art Prices Current 27 (1952): A52, Leggatt purchased lot 108 for £27 6s. Archival research has shown that Leggatt Brothers served as purchasing agents for the Starrs. See correspondence between Betty Hogg and Martha Jane Starr, May 15 and June 3, 1950, Nelson-Atkins curatorial files.
Catalogue of Objects of Art and Vertu, Miniatures, Coins, and Glass Paperweights (London: Christie, Manson, and Woods, December 19, 1949), 12, as Portrait of a Gentleman.
Ross E. Taggart, The Starr Collection of Miniatures in the William Rockhill Nelson Gallery (Kansas City, MO: Nelson Gallery-Atkins Museum, 1971), no. 84, p. 30, (repro.), as attributed to George Engleheart, Unknown Man.
Maggie Keenan, “George Engleheart, Portrait of a Man, ca. 1800,” catalogue entry in Aimee Marcereau DeGalan, Blythe Sobol, and Maggie Keenan, The Starr Collection of Portrait Miniatures, 1500–1850: The Collections of the Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art, vol. 2, ed. Aimee Marcereau DeGalan (Kansas City: The Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art, 2024), https://doi.org/10.37764/8322.5.1390.
