"Profile of Little Girl Wearing Coral Beads"

Dateca. 1835

Attributed to J. H. Gillespie (1793-after 1849)

OriginAmerica, Mid-Atlantic or New England

MediumWatercolor, gouache, pencil on wove paper

Dimensions18 1/2" X 16", framed with four others 2 11/16" x 2 3/16" (6.8 cm. x 5.6 cm.)

Credit LineBequest of Grace H. Westerfield

Object number1974.300.7

DescriptionHalf-length profile portrait of a young girl facing left in an oval. She is wearing a matte black dress shaded with gloss black; the dress has a high waist, low neck and puffed short sleeves. She wears a double strand of red (coral) beads around her neck. She has light brown hair and blue eyes. Her hair, and particularly her facial features, are very delicately shaded and sensitively rendered. The background around the figure is shaded with light blue with brown stippled effect to suggest shadow and depth around perimeter and at base of oval surround.
Label TextWhat little is known of the miniature portrait painter J. H. Gillespie has been gleaned primarily from a handful of newspaper advertisements documenting at least a ten- year period of his activity in North America. In an announcement dated 1828, but recorded in the Halifax, Nova Scotia, Acadian Recorder of February 28, 1829, Gillespie, then "late of London, Edinburgh, and Liverpool," claimed a "patronage entirely unprecedented to the place." Indeed, in a subsequent Saint John, New Brunswick, advertisement he states that he had more than 1400 miniature portrait commissions in Halifax alone. Because of the demand for likenesses in Halifax, Gillespie adopted the practice of taking the outlines of his subjects in the morning hours while reserving the remainder of the day for their completion. Gillespie charged 25 cents for plain black profiles or silhouettes, 50 cents for those shaded in black, one dollar if finished in bronze, and two dollars for "features neatly painted in colours." The various types of outlines were evidently achieved by means of "several mechanical and optical instruments." When Gillespie moved on to Saint John in 1830, he invited the public to examine his "very curious and elegant apparatus" by which he claimed to have by then taken upwards of 30,000 likenesses over a period of "above twenty years."

By 1835 Gillespie was working in Maine and‚ by December 1837, when Gillespie was advertising in Baltimore, he had increased his charge for profiles painted in colors to four dollars each. In December 1838, Gillespie, "late of London and New York," was offering his services in Philadelphia. His further travels in this country have not been documented beyond 1838, although it has been suggested that he worked in Kentucky at a later date.

Gillespie's profiles are generally crisply delineated with subtleties in modeling often enhanced by white gouache in the depiction of lace and other finery of female subjects' costumes. When his backgrounds are developed they are usually a stippled mixture of brown and blue modeling that shades to the edges of the portrait, which is often oval in format.
MarkingsNone found
ProvenanceBequest of Grace H. Westerfield