Monday, January 4, 2016

George Engleheart, 18th century English miniature painter

George Engleheart
Mrs. Boulton
1812
Victoria & Albert Museum

George Engleheart
Portrait of a Woman
1780s
Victoria & Albert Museum

This group of English portrait miniatures by George Engleheart (1752-1829) might easily be taken to represent the cast of an Austen novel. The social and even familial similarities among these mild, composed faces seem stronger and far more significant than individual variations based on relative trivialities like gender and age. Austen, or even Thackeray (but not Dickens) would have comprehended the specific social niches occupied by each of these represented persons with an accuracy and detail that can never be recovered now, not even imaginatively. Yet in the realm of inescapable ignorance  where all citizens of the present age must dwell  there is still a perceptible difference between portraits of people from the past whose names are remembered and portraits of people whose names are lost. The faces without names seem more decisively suspended in aspic.

George Engleheart
John Dyer Collier
c. 1785
Victoria & Albert Museum

George Engleheart
Portrait of a Woman
c. 1805
Victoria & Albert Museum

George Engleheart
Portrait of a Man
c. 1800
Victoria & Albert Museum

George Engleheart
Portrait of a Woman
1775
Victoria & Albert Museum

George Engleheart
Colonel Cuppage
c. 1805
Victoria & Albert Museum

George Engleheart
Portrait of a Woman
c. 1800
Victoria & Albert Museum

George Engleheart
Portrait of a Girl
1807
Victoria & Albert Museum

George Engleheart
Sir Thomas Stepney
1785
Victoria & Albert Museum

George Engleheart
Mrs. Peter De Lancey (Elizabeth Colden)
1783
Metropolitan Museum of Art

George Engleheart
Self-portrait
ca. 1803
National Portrait Gallery (U.K.)