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Title
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Anne Mee, Self Portrait
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Date
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c. 1795
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Description
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Miniature self portrait by Mrs. Anne Mee, born Anne Foldsone, on ivory. Great Britain, ca.1795. Oval head and shoulders miniature portrait, turned slightly to right and looking to front. The sitter is wearing a cream dress, her hair about her shoulders and fabric around her head.
In the 18th century, miniature painting was a popular genteel pastime, particularly for ladies. Miniature painting could therefore offer those gentlewomen who found themselves with neither father nor husband to support them the chance to earn a living from their former pastime. This is a self-portrait by Anna Foldsone, who lost her father when young and took to miniature painting to support her mother and her many siblings. When she married, becoming generally known as ‘Mrs Mee’, she continued to paint. But the diarist Joseph Farington noted that Mrs Mee's husband ‘had consented to let her paint ladies only who were never to be attended [at the sittings] by gentlemen’. The reason for this was that painting a portrait was an intimate process, with the artist looking intently at a sitter at close quarters. This is precisely the intimacy that made it so attractive as a domestic art for ladies painting their close relations and friends. But in a professional studio, such a closeness could lead to gossip concerning impropriety. Hence, many women miniaturists chose (or were persuaded) not to work professionally after marriage. In contrast, Mrs Mee continued as a highly successful artist, most famously working at Windsor Castle on a series of paintings of ‘beauties’ - portraits of the most glamorous women attached to the Court.
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height
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7.6 cm
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width
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5.7 cm
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Provenance
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Given by Mrs Arthur R. Fuller
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Rights
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Victoria and Albert Museum, London
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Identifier
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P.12-1962
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