Youthful Curls

This winsome silhouette, typical of Mrs Beetham’s meticulous work, shows a little boy in a shirt with a wide frill-edged collar and buttoned jacket. His curls tumble over his shoulders as was the fashion for boys during the Georgian era.

Dating to around 1780-1790, the profile is reverse painted on convex glass and backed with plaster within a handsome gold and black verre églomisé border. It is housed in the original turned pearwood frame. There is a small area of delamination to the paintwork on the face. The verre églomisé border was likely painted by Mrs Beetham’s husband, Edward, as he had travelled to Murano around this time to study glass painting.

Isabella Beetham (1754-1825) began cutting silhouettes out of necessity to support her young family and was fortunate to be taught painting during the early 1780s by John Smart, the acclaimed miniaturist. Her husband meantime was a dabbler: he tried acting on stage, he designed a theatre safety curtain, he took in lodgers, he built and sold new-fangled washing machines, he offered insurance cover and so on.