Portrait of a Man
Framed: 2 15/16 × 2 11/16 inches (7.46 × 6.83 cm)
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The Starr Foundation Collection of Miniatures, The Royal Ontario Museum, Toronto, December 8, 1972–January 14, 1973, no cat., no. 99, as Unknown Man.
John Smart: Virtuoso in Miniature, The Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art, Kansas City, MO, December 21, 2024–January 4, 2026, no cat., as Portrait of a Man.
Elsie Gertrude Kehoe (1888–1967), Cliffe Dene, Saltdean, Sussex, England, by June 15, 1950;
Purchased from her sale, Objects of Vertu, Fine Watches, Etc., Sotheby, London, June 15, 1950, lot 172, as A Man, by A. B. Turner, 1950 [1];
With S. J. Phillips, London, by April 1959 [2];
Mr. John W. (1905–2000) and Mrs. Martha Jane (1906–2011) Starr, Kansas City, MO, by 1965;
Their gift to the Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art, Kansas City, MO, 1965.
Notes
[1] The lot description states, “A small miniature of a man, by John Smart, signed, head and shoulders three-quarters dexter, powdered hair en queue, white cravat, reddy-brown coat, oval, 1 1/2 in. [See Frontispiece].” According to an attached price list, A. B. Turner bought lot 172 for £52.
[2] The miniature is advertised by the dealer in The Connoisseur, April 1959, XXXIII.
Catalogue of Objects of Vertu, Fine Watches, Etc. (London: Sotheby, June 15, 1950), lot 172, as A Man.
Connoisseur 143, no. 576 (April 1959): XXXIII (repro.).
Ross E. Taggart, The Starr Collection of Miniatures in the William Rockhill Nelson Gallery (Kansas City, MO: Nelson Gallery-Atkins Museum, 1971), no. 99, p. 38, (repro.), as Unknown Man.
Maggie Keenan, “John Smart, Portrait of a Man, 1773,” 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. 4, ed. Aimee Marcereau DeGalan (Kansas City, MO: Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art, 2025), https://doi.org/10.37764/8322.5.1534.
