F. Fry, Portrait of a Circassian Woman – Original c.1830 watercolour painting

F. Fry Portrait of a Circassian Woman

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View the full Collection: Portrait Miniatures: Early 19th-century Watercolours

An original c.1830 watercolour painting, F. Fry, Portrait of a Circassian Woman.

This wonderfully vivid and precise portrait in gouache and watercolour depicts a 'Circassian' woman, a term used to describe the people of the North Caucasus, an area along the northeast shore of the Black Sea. Throughout history Circassian women were considered to be unusually beautiful, spirited, and elegant, and as such were desirable as concubines. This led to idealisation of the 'Circassian beauty' and in the 19th century this became a common trope in Western Orientalism.

The Circassian people were expelled from their homeland in the 1860s by Tsar Alexander II and many migrated to areas of the neighbouring Ottoman Empire, settling in Turkey, the Balkans and elsewhere in the Middle East. Circassian women were admired for their translucent pale complexions, regular features, light-coloured eyes and hair which was often blonde or auburn.

This exquisite painting conveys something of this 'perfect' beauty: the gem-like opacity of the gouache to the ornate clothing and hat makes the figure radiate off the page, and the watercolour to the face renders her fine features with the greatest of delicacy.

The painting is one of a pair, the other of which is signed 'F. Fry 1830' (see JT-017). F. Fry appears to have been a professional portrait artist. There is an extant portrait bearing the same signature of a man thought to be Oscar Wilde (private collection).

With gum arabic to intensify the colour. On card laid down on backing paper.

Portrait Miniatures: Early 19th-century Watercolours

This painting forms part of a group of exceptional watercolour portrait miniatures which derive from an album dating from the 1830s. The paintings are by a variety of hands, including Charles Frederick Bulkley (1812–1869), Benjamin Baldwin (fl.1826–1847) and Edward Purcell (fl.1812–1831). What the paintings share is that they are small in scale and exquisitely executed, with the fineness of brushwork—delicate touches and dots—associated with portrait miniatures.

Sitters include some notable figures of the day: Mary Margaret Stanley Egerton, Countess of Wilton (1801–1858), the actress Lucia Elizabeth Vestris (1797–1856) and the artist James Northcote RA (1746–1831). Others are idealised anonymous beauties—rustic, shawled and caped young ladies, and a man and woman of the Circassia people, reputed to be the most beautiful in the world.

These paintings are examples of the prevailing 19th-century fashion for larger and more richly detailed miniatures in the style developed by the Scottish miniaturist Andrew Robertson (1777–1845) at the beginning of the century. Robertson's work broke with previous 18th-century styles and particularly that of Richard Cosway (1742–1821), whose paintings he criticised as 'pretty things but not pictures'. Like Robertson's miniatures, many of the paintings in this collection are fuller portraits with suggested settings or props; emulating large oils on canvas, they are rectangular in format and with gum arabic added to the paint to give it greater lustre and depth of colour.

These exquisite examples of portraits from the early 19th century are very much of their time. The work of top-class miniaturists was extremely expensive, given the painstaking time and skill taken to produce their paintings, and the art began to die out as the 19th century progressed. The advent of photography from the mid-19th century provided a wider public with affordable, accurate likenesses. Many miniaturists at the cheaper end of the market took up photography, while younger artists rarely pursued careers as miniaturists.