{
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"accession_number": "1997.78",
"share_license_status": "CC0",
"tombstone": "Portrait of Miss Mary Tadman, 1809. John I Smart (British, 1741\u20131811). Watercolor and graphite, heightened with traces of white gouache on paper; image: 14.2 x 12.2 cm (5 9/16 x 4 13/16 in.); sheet: 15.4 x 13.4 cm (6 1/16 x 5 1/4 in.). The Cleveland Museum of Art, Bequest of Mrs. A. Dean Perry, 1997.78",
"current_location": null,
"title": "Portrait of Miss Mary Tadman",
"creation_date": "1809",
"creation_date_earliest": 1809,
"creation_date_latest": 1809,
"artists_tags": [
"male"
],
"culture": [
"England, 18th century"
],
"technique": "watercolor and graphite, heightened with traces of white gouache on paper",
"support_materials": [
{
"description": "wove paper (discolored to light brown)",
"watermarks": []
}
],
"department": "Drawings",
"collection": "DR - British",
"type": "Portrait Miniature",
"measurements": "Image: 14.2 x 12.2 cm (5 9/16 x 4 13/16 in.); Sheet: 15.4 x 13.4 cm (6 1/16 x 5 1/4 in.)",
"dimensions": {
"sheet": {
"height": 0.154,
"height_inch": 6,
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"width": 0.134,
"width_inch": 5,
"width_inch_fraction": 0.25
},
"image": {
"height": 0.142,
"height_inch": 5,
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"width": 0.122,
"width_inch": 4,
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"inscriptions": [
{
"inscription": "signed, lower right, in gray watercolor: John Smart pinxit / Novr. 1809 ; by artist, lower left, in gray watercolor: Miss Mary Tadman ; VERSO, upper left, in graphite: B/8",
"inscription_translation": null,
"inscription_remark": null,
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"exhibitions": {
"current": [
{
"id": 202388,
"title": "Disembodied: Portrait Minatures and their Contemporary Relatives",
"description": "Disembodied: Portrait Minatures and their Contemporary Relatives. The Cleveland Museum of Art, Cleveland, OH (organizer) (November 10, 2013-February 16, 2014).",
"opening_date": "2013-11-10T00:00:00"
}
],
"legacy": []
},
"provenance": [
{
"description": "John Smart (1741-1811); by inheritance to his son John James Smart",
"citations": [],
"footnotes": null,
"date": "Until 1811",
"sortorder": 1
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{
"description": "John James Smart (1805-1870); by inheritance to his daughter Mary Ann Bose",
"citations": [],
"footnotes": null,
"date": "1811-70",
"sortorder": 2
},
{
"description": "Mary Ann Bose (n\u00e9e Smart, 1856-1934), by inheritance to her daughter Lilian Mary Dyer",
"citations": [],
"footnotes": null,
"date": "1870-1934",
"sortorder": 3
},
{
"description": "Lilian Mary Dyer (n\u00e9e Bose, 1876-1955), great-granddaughter of the artist.",
"citations": [],
"footnotes": null,
"date": "1934-37",
"sortorder": 4
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{
"description": "Sale: Christie\u2019s, London, November 26, 1937 (lot 42)",
"citations": [],
"footnotes": null,
"date": "November 26, 1937",
"sortorder": 5
},
{
"description": "(Colnaghi, London)",
"citations": [],
"footnotes": null,
"date": "After 1937",
"sortorder": 6
},
{
"description": "Edward B. Greene (1878-1957), Cleveland, OH; by inheritance to his daughter Helen Perry",
"citations": [],
"footnotes": null,
"date": "Before 1957",
"sortorder": 7
},
{
"description": "Helen Perry (n\u00e9e Greene, 1911-1996), Cleveland, OH",
"citations": [],
"footnotes": null,
"date": "c. 1957-96",
"sortorder": 8
},
{
"description": "Estate of Mrs. Helen Perry; gifted to the Cleveland Museum of Art",
"citations": [],
"footnotes": null,
"date": "1996-97",
"sortorder": 9
},
{
"description": "The Cleveland Museum of Art, Cleveland, OH",
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"date": "1997-",
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"did_you_know": "This drawing was passed on through the generations of the artist John Smart's family until 1937 when his great-granddaughter sold it.",
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"description": "Mary Tadman\u2019s head and shoulders face right. Her eyes are brown, and she wears a necklace of small pearls and a drop pearl earring. She wears her dark brown hair high in a classically inspired bun, with a braid across the hairline and many curls falling over her forehead and in front of her ears. Her white dress is delicately embroidered at the edges along the bust and is tied at the empire style waist, with a small pin fastened to the front. The translucent
white sleeves worn beneath the dress are probably made of muslin and detachable, since they do not appear in the ivory version of the portrait. Detachable sleeves were popular during the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries and enabled a dress to function as day- and eveningwear. The nature of this work as a finished drawing rather than exclusively a preparatory sketch for a miniature on ivory is evident in the degree of finish of the sitter\u2019s clothing, heightened with white gouache and painted to the elaborated penciled oval border.
In December 1809, the year this drawing was executed, Mary Tadman (1786\u20131862) married Major William Jolliffe Eldridge. He died in 1818 in Poona, India, and three years later, his widow married Colonel Daniel Hutchins Bellasis (1785\u20131836), with whom she had two children: Flora and Augustus Fortunatus. Mary lived for nearly two decades in India, where she was a celebrated beauty, and where her second marriage into the militarily distinguished Bellasis family seems to have secured her presence in high society. On the occasion of her marriage in 1821, she wrote her spinster sister, \u201cI forgot I have not told you a word of my marriage, which by the by was the grandest affair known in Bombay, I am almost tired of the subject\u2014visits and congratulations, etc. The Governor and Staff went with me to Church . . . and all the people of any consequence in Bombay about 100 came to a Breakfast at Randall Lodge\u2014since which it has been one constant scene of gaiety. Last week, pity me when I tell you, how I was obliged to exert myself\u2014we gave a dinner party to 40 people. The Governor\u2019s family . . . and all the Big Wigs who gave me parties\u2014the same evening 160 came at ten to a dance\u2014afterwards a supper very splendid I assure you.\u201d
A related ivory version of this miniature is in the Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge, signed and dated at the lower left: \u201cJ S / 1809.\u201d While Miss Tadman\u2019s coiffure, countenance, jewelry, and dress are identical to the Cleveland sketch, in this portrait she wears an elaborate black and red, flowered Indian shawl with white border over her white dress, the under-sleeves omitted. Indian shawls, particularly those from Kashmir, were extremely expensive signifiers of social status in India and Europe, and by the end of the eighteenth century, they often formed part of the trousseau of a wealthy French or English bride. The shawls were particularly fashionable worn in contrast with the high-waisted gauzy white dresses of the Empire period. While many portraits and miniatures from the early nineteenth century depict women conspicuously displaying their Indian shawls, Miss Tadman wears hers in a manner not often seen in European portraits: across one shoulder and around the waist, like a sari. Mary and William Eldridge wed in December 1809, one month after Smart signed this sketch. Because Smart depicted Miss Tadman during her engagement, the shawl worn in the finished ivory portrait may have been a gift from her betrothed, who had been stationed in Bombay in 1809. While appropriate for a half-length portrait, the under-sleeves were probably deemed unnecessary for the miniature, which shows little of the arm and instead depicts the sitter more formally, wrapped in her shawl.
The existence of a larger, finished drawing as well as a miniature on ivory suggests that the finished drawing may have served a variety of roles, while also implying that another preparatory sketch for both may exist. At nearly twice the size of the ivory, Cleveland\u2019s drawing is not likely to have been the sole preparatory exercise for the finished miniature. There is no question that as a young bride-to-be, Miss Tadman was thinking carefully about how she wished to be represented at a pivotal moment in her life, and that a single portrait was insufficient to accommodate all of the accoutrements that were of significance to her. The neo-Grec coiffure, au courant empire waist dress with detachable sleeves, pearl parure, ornamental pin, and costly shawl communicate clearly the social ambitions to which her
biography is also a testament.",
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"citations": [
{
"citation": "Christie, Manson & Woods. Ancient and Modern Pictures and Drawings. 1937.",
"page_number": "lot 42",
"url": ""
},
{
"citation": "Foskett, Daphne. John Smart: the Man and His Miniatures. [London]: Cory, Adams & Mackay, 1964.",
"page_number": "pp. 74, 88",
"url": ""
},
{
"citation": "Korkow, Cory, and Jon L. Seydl. British Portrait Miniatures: The Cleveland Museum of Art. 2013.",
"page_number": "Cat. no. 50, pp. 204-207",
"url": ""
}
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"creditline": "Bequest of Mrs. A. Dean Perry",
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"id": 3691,
"description": "John I Smart (British, 1741\u20131811)",
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"biography": "John Smart is often regarded as the most skilled painter of portrait miniatures at the height of the art form\u2019s popularity in late-eighteenth-century Britain. While the free style and white and blue color palette of his rival Richard Cosway (1742\u20131821) conjured up the glamour of fashionable society, Smart\u2019s attention to minute detail, saturated colors, and frank conveyance of likeness and character attracted a different type of clientele, one who prized these qualities
above Cosway\u2019s homogenized modishness.
Information is limited about Smart\u2019s life and career, so much so that while G. C. Williamson had penned the definitive biographies of Cosway, George Engleheart (1752\u20131829), and Andrew Plimer (1763\u20131837) by 1905, it wasn\u2019t until 1964 that a biography of Smart appeared. Little is known about the artist\u2019s early training beyond evidence suggesting that before the age of fourteen, he was winning prizes from the Society of Arts for his drawings and, like Cosway, was an apprentice in William Shipley\u2019s London school in St. Martin\u2019s Lane. Smart exhibited for several years as an active member and eventually president of the Society of Artists of Great Britain before seeking his fortune as a miniature painter in India, where he lived between 1785 and 1795, hoping to secure patronage from wealthy princes and those
involved in England\u2019s growing trade market. Works from this period are signed with the initial I, signifying India.
Unlike Cosway, an ostentatious showman, Smart lived and worked quietly, settling in London after his return from India and exhibiting at the Royal Academy. His style, which changed little throughout his career, is characterized by a meticulous description of a sitter\u2019s countenance through the use of delicate stippling, often featuring wrinkles, crow\u2019s feet around the eyes, and a slightly upturned mouth that suggests joviality. Unlike his contemporaries Cosway, Engleheart, and Plimer, whose backgrounds most often featured blue and white cloudy skies, Smart painted his backgrounds in varying shades of browns, greens, and grays. The size of the artist\u2019s miniatures expanded over time, measuring around 11/ 2 inches until about 1775, then 2 inches until around 1790, and 3 inches thereafter. Though
highly sought after in his time, Smart\u2019s work grew even more popular among collectors following his death. The Cleveland Museum of Art has a total of twenty-three portraits by Smart: seven gentlemen sitters painted on ivory and sixteen preparatory drawings of men and women. Of the seven miniatures on ivory, two date from 1770, three from
Smart\u2019s years in India, and two after his 1795 return to London.",
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"sortable_date": 1809,
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"updated_at": "2026-05-29 08:18:47.895000"
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