Portrait of a Girl, Probably Frances Taylor
Framed: 3 1/4 × 2 11/16 inches (8.26 × 6.83 cm)
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John Smart—Miniaturist: 1741/2–1811, The Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art, Kansas City, MO, December 9, 1965–January 2, 1966, no cat., as Young Girl.
The Starr Foundation Collection of Miniatures, The Royal Ontario Museum, Toronto, December 8, 1972–January 14, 1973, no cat., no. 126, as Unknown Young Girl.
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 Girl, Probably Frances Taylor.
The Starrs particularly cherished Smart’s portraits of children and gave a number of them to the museum. This young girl was the daughter of a British East India Company official based in Madras (modern-day Chennai). The tiny “I” inscribed with Smart’s precise hand below the date of the miniature confirms it was painted in India.
Unknown woman, by 1958 [1];
Purchased from her sale, Fine Portrait Miniatures, Gold Boxes, and Objects of Vertu, Sotheby’s, London, May 1, 1958, lot 79, as A Young Girl, by Leggatt Brothers, London, probably on behalf of John W. (1905–2000) and Martha Jane (1906–2011) Starr, Kansas City, MO, 1958–1965 [2];
Their gift to the Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art, Kansas City, MO, 1965.
Notes
[1] In the Sotheby’s May 1, 1958, sale, “A Lady” sold lots 64–80.
[2] The sale catalogue describes lot 79 as “an attractive miniature of a Young Girl, by John Smart, with his Indian signature and the date 1793, three quarters profile to dexter, with long dark hair falling down her back, wearing a low-cut white dress with a frill around the neck and a pale blue sash, cloud and sky background, 3 in.”
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, NAMA curatorial files. This catalogue is located at University of Missouri-Kansas City’s Miller Nichols Library and was annotated, probably by the Starrs, with “Leggatt 540 16[?illegible]” written in pencil, indicating the purchaser and sale price, and with the date of the miniature circled. 1793 was most likely a year that the Starrs were trying to fill in their search for a signed and dated Smart for each year of his career.
Catalogue of Fine Portrait Miniatures, Gold Boxes, and Objects of Vertu (London: Sotheby’s, May 1, 1958), 15, (repro.), as A Young Girl.
“Advertisement: Sotheby and Co.,” Burlington Magazine 100, no. 661 (April 1958): v, (repro.), as A Miniature of a young girl.
Daphne Foskett, “Fresh Light on John Smart,” Apollo 77 (June 1963): 472-74, (repro.), erroneously as Miss Travers.
Ross E. Taggart, The Starr Collection of Miniatures in the William Rockhill Nelson Gallery (Kansas City, MO: Nelson Gallery-Atkins Museum, 1971), no. 126, p. 44, (repro.), as Unknown Young Girl.
Emma Rutherford and Lawrence Hendra, John Smart: A Genius Magnified (London: Philip Mould, 2014), 76, (repro.).
Blythe Sobol, “John Smart, Portrait of a Girl, Probably Frances Taylor, 1793,” 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/10.37764/8322.5.1600.
