A Natural Beauty

Dating to the last quarter of the 18th century, this striking portrait depicts a young blue-eyed lady in a white dress trimmed with blue and worn with a fichu, her natural curls tumbling over her shoulders and decorated with a rope of pearls and entwined with yellow and white ribbon.

The portrait is a good example of Donaldson’s penchant for using blue shading around the eyes. It is set in the original gold plated frame that is enclosed reverse.

Writing in the Connoisseur in 1907, Dr George Williamson described the artist John Donaldson as ‘surely one of the oddest painters that ever lived’. From humble beginnings (his father made gloves) Donaldson drifted from painting porcelain into portraiture winning early recognition and prizes from the Society of Arts. After only a few years, however, he developed a fascination for chemistry wasting hard-earned money on failed experiments and neglecting his clients who often turned up at his studio to be greeted with a Not at Home notice. He also published a volume of poetry that flopped. Indeed, ‘his eccentricities were most extraordinary’ and his politics most radical that he ‘made enemies in all directions’. The partial loss of his eyesight in later life compounded Donaldson’s misery and he lived out his last decades in deep poverty.

And yet this highly accomplished portrait is testament to a talent that, if only he hadn’t mixed business with politics but had concentrated solely on his art, would surely have guaranteed him a steady clientele and given him an excellent living.

Ivory Exemption Ref.: AG7N9NZM