Soulful Matilda

Anne Mee often painted her sitters with overly large eyes to add melodrama and it is this trait that makes her portraits especially recognisable. Traditionally known as Mathilda Fielding, this lady has soulful blue eyes and rosebud lips. Her unruly curls are topped with a turban style headdress that also runs under her chin.

The portrait is set in a gold-plated fausee-montre frame, the reverse featuring a delightful memorial miniature showing a young female mourning by an obelisk surrounded by cypress trees symbolically pointing to heaven. Set on a base of chopped hair, the obelisk is painted in yellow and black with touches of red and white and decorated with seed pearls and gold wire. A couple of gold wire strands have slipped within the frame but otherwise the miniatures front and back are fine.

Anne Mee was one of only a few female artists working commercially in England during the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century. Having learned to paint whilst helping out in her father’s studio, she was obliged to put her brushes to profitable use upon his unexpected demise. Throughout her career she enjoyed Royal patronage culminating in a commission from the Prince Regent, later George IV, to paint an ambitious series of portraits of the most beautiful society ladies of the day. Following her marriage to an Irish barrister, Mrs Mee had six children. She continued to paint though, according to the diarist Joseph Farington, her husband ‘consented to let her paint ladies only who were never to be attended [at the sittings] by gentlemen’. She exhibited intermittently at the Royal Academy between 1804 and 1837; further examples of her work can be viewed at the V. & A. Museum in London.

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