Portrait of a Woman
Framed: 2 1/8 × 1 5/16 inches (5.4 × 3.33 cm)
W. Briscoe, Esq., by 1955 [1];
Sold at his sale, Fine Portrait Miniatures and Objects of Vertu, Sotheby’s, London, December 5, 1955, lot 41, as A Miniature of a Lady [2];
Mr. John W. (1905–2000) and Mrs. Martha Jane (1906–2011) Starr, Kansas City, MO, by 1958;
Their gift to The Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art, Kansas City, MO, 1958.
Notes
[1] According to the sales catalogue, lots 19–65 were “The Property of W. Briscoe, Esq.”
[2] Described in the catalogue as “A Miniature of a Lady, by Henry Spicer, signed with initials S H. nearly half length, three-quarters sinister, gaze directed at spectator, a coil of brown hair on her left shoulder, wearing an attractive pink dress and coloured sash, 1 3/4 in. Spicer was a pupil of Gervase Spencer and close friend of Ozias Humphry. (See Frontispiece).” The annotated catalogue for this sale is located at University of Missouri-Kansas City’s Miller Nichols Library. The annotations are most likely by Mr. or Mrs. Starr. Lot number 41 is circled.
Catalogue of Fine Portrait Miniatures and Objects of Vertu (London: Sotheby’s, December 5, 1955), 10, (repro.), as A Miniature of a Lady
Ross E. Taggart, ed., Handbook of the Collections in the William Rockhill Nelson Gallery of Art and Mary Atkins Museum of Fine Arts, 4th ed. (Kansas City, MO: William Rockhill Nelson Gallery of Art and Mary Atkins Museum of Fine Arts, 1959), 265, as Portrait of a Lady.
Ross E. Taggart, The Starr Collection of Miniatures in the William Rockhill Nelson Gallery (Kansas City, MO: Nelson Gallery-Atkins Museum, 1971), no. 166, p. 57, (repro.), as Unknown Lady.
Aimee Marcereau DeGalan, “Henry Spicer, Portrait of a Woman, ca. 1774,” 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. 3, ed. Aimee Marcereau DeGalan (Kansas City: Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art, 2024), https://doi.org/10.37764/8322.5.1654.
