{
"data": {
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"accession_number": "2010.461",
"share_license_status": "CC0",
"tombstone": "Portrait of Anne Law (n\u00e9e Towry), 1st Lady Ellenborough, c. 1821. John Linnell (British, 1792\u20131882). Watercolor on ivory heightened with gum arabic; framed: 23.4 x 20.7 cm (9 3/16 x 8 1/8 in.); unframed: 11.3 x 8.5 cm (4 7/16 x 3 3/8 in.). The Cleveland Museum of Art, Dudley P. Allen Fund, 2010.461",
"current_location": null,
"title": "Portrait of Anne Law (n\u00e9e Towry), 1st Lady Ellenborough",
"creation_date": "c. 1821",
"creation_date_earliest": 1816,
"creation_date_latest": 1826,
"artists_tags": [
"male"
],
"culture": [
"England, 19th century"
],
"technique": "watercolor on ivory heightened with gum arabic",
"support_materials": [],
"department": "Modern European Painting and Sculpture",
"collection": "Mod Euro - Painting 1800-1960",
"type": "Portrait Miniature",
"measurements": "Framed: 23.4 x 20.7 cm (9 3/16 x 8 1/8 in.); Unframed: 11.3 x 8.5 cm (4 7/16 x 3 3/8 in.)",
"dimensions": {
"framed": {
"height": 0.234,
"height_inch": 9,
"height_inch_fraction": 0.1875,
"width": 0.207,
"width_inch": 8,
"width_inch_fraction": 0.125
},
"unframed": {
"height": 0.113,
"height_inch": 4,
"height_inch_fraction": 0.4375,
"width": 0.085,
"width_inch": 3,
"width_inch_fraction": 0.375
}
},
"state_of_the_work": null,
"edition_of_the_work": null,
"copyright": null,
"inscriptions": [],
"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": "Anne Law, 1st Lady Ellenborough (n\u00e9e Towry, c. 1769\u20131843), by inheritance to her daughter, Frederica Selina Ramsden",
"citations": [],
"footnotes": null,
"date": "c. 1821-1843",
"sortorder": 1
},
{
"description": "Frederica Selina Ramsden (n\u00e9e\nLaw, 1805\u20131879), Oxton Hall, Yorkshire, by inheritance to her son John Charles Francis Ramsden",
"citations": [],
"footnotes": null,
"date": "1843-79",
"sortorder": 2
},
{
"description": "John Charles Francis Ramsden\n(1835\u20131910), Willinghurst, Surrey, by inheritance to his son Capt. Frederick William Ramsden",
"citations": [],
"footnotes": null,
"date": "1879-1910",
"sortorder": 3
},
{
"description": "Capt. Frederick William Ramsden (1871\u20131958), Willinghurst, Surrey, by inheritance to his daughter Moyra Gwendolin Russell-Clarke",
"citations": [],
"footnotes": null,
"date": "1910-1958",
"sortorder": 4
},
{
"description": "Moyra Gwendolin Russell-Clarke (n\u00e9e Ramsden, 1900\u20131981), by inheritance to her great-niece Julia Ann Llewellyn",
"citations": [],
"footnotes": null,
"date": "1958-81",
"sortorder": 5
},
{
"description": "Julia Ann Llewellyn (n\u00e9e Cooke, b. 1948), London, England",
"citations": [],
"footnotes": null,
"date": "1981-2010",
"sortorder": 6
},
{
"description": "(Sale: Bonhams (Knightsbridge) on November 24, 2010, lot 189).",
"citations": [],
"footnotes": null,
"date": "November 24, 2010",
"sortorder": 7
},
{
"description": "The Cleveland Museum of Art, Cleveland, OH",
"citations": [],
"footnotes": null,
"date": "2010-",
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}
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"did_you_know": "Lady Ellenborough was described as \u201cso exceedingly lovely, that passengers would linger to watch her watering the flowers\u2014such was the fashion of the day\u2014on the balcony of their house in Bloomsbury Square.\u201d",
"description": "John Linnell was born and lived much of his young adulthood in Bloomsbury, where his father, James, made picture
frames and restored paintings. As a boy the artist trained briefly with Benjamin West (1738\u20131820) and John Varley (1778\u20131842) before becoming a student at the Royal Academy from 1805 to 1812. Though primarily known for his landscapes, Linnell was also a prolific portraitist and executed miniatures during the first two decades of his career, learning the medium from his neighbor James Holmes (1770\u20131860). According to an early biographer, Linnell began painting miniatures around 1818 with a portrait of his wife. By 1823 he had executed a number of miniature commissions from aristocratic patrons, including Princess Sophia, facilitated by the praise of the society maven Lady Stafford. He painted his last known miniature on ivory in 1832. During the approximately fifteen years that the artist painted miniatures, he consistently charged between 10 and 50 guineas for a portrait. These fees corresponded less to the size of the ivory than to the degree of finish and elaboration of the composition.
In this portrait Anne Law (n\u00e9e Towry), 1st Lady Ellenborough (c. 1769\u20131843), is depicted half length. She wears a high-waisted white dress of translucent fabric through which a hint of blue appears and around which she wears a black belt. A devant de corsage (stomacher, or bodice brooch) is worn at her d\u00e9colletage, extending to the belt. Its gold framework contains at least twelve semiprecious stones colored blue, red, aquamarine, pink, and brown. A gold brooch with a large blue stone is pinned to the cloak at her right shoulder. She also wears a twisted multistrand pearl necklace, matching pearl pendant earrings, and two gold rings on her left ring finger. A dark gray-green shawl with red reverse, gold border, and red fringe is draped over her shoulders and arms. She holds a closed fan in her left hand and stands against a brown background featuring a green and auburn striped curtain in the upper left corner. The sitter\u2019s fair hair is dressed in ringlets that fall at her neck. The miniature is housed in a standing gilt metal and red velvet frame that dates from the same period.",
"external_resources": {
"wikidata": [
"https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Q80075164"
],
"internet_archive": [
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"citations": [
{
"citation": "Mann, C. Griffith. \"Acquisitions 2010.\" Cleveland Art: Cleveland Museum of Art Members Magazine 51, no. 2 (March/April 2011): 10-27.",
"page_number": "Mentioned and reproduced: p. 17",
"url": "https://archive.org/details/CMAMM2011-02/page/16/mode/2up"
},
{
"citation": "Korkow, Cory, and Dario Robleto. Disembodied: Portrait Miniatures and Their Contemporary Relatives. 2013.",
"page_number": "Mentioned: p. 84",
"url": null
},
{
"citation": "Korkow, Cory, and Jon L. Seydl. British Portrait Miniatures: The Cleveland Museum of Art. 2013.",
"page_number": "Cat. no. 71, pp. 271-274",
"url": ""
}
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"creditline": "Dudley P. Allen Fund",
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"description": "John Linnell (British, 1792\u20131882)",
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"biography": "The precocious son of a Bloomsbury frame maker, John Linnell entered the Royal Academy schools in 1805 at the same time that he began studying with influential watercolor painter and drawing master John Varley (1778-1842). Under Varley's tutelage, but primarily in the company of fellow student William Mulready (1786-1863), Linnell mastered plein-air landscape painting. His studies at the Kensington gravel pits (ca. 1812) and other locales in and around London are remarkable for the intensity and novelty of their naturalistic observation. From 1807 Linnell was a regular contributor of landscape and portrait paintings at the Royal Academy, the British Institution, and the Society of Painters in Watercolours. His conversion to the Baptist faith in 1811 intensified his conviction that meticulous landscape realism was a moral act pursued as a duty to God's creation. Primarily for financial reasons, Linnell painted his first miniature portrait in 1816, after which portraiture in all media tended to dominate his professional production for several decades. In 1818 he befriended William Blake (1757-1827), virtually supporting that irascible genius during his last years with important commissions, including The Book of Job engravings and the 102 watercolor illustrations to Dante's Divine Comedy. Linnell's commitment to landscape painting as a spiritual art profoundly influenced the visionary early work of his pupil and future son-in-law, Samuel Palmer (1805-1881). In the 1840s, but especially after 1851, when he moved his family to Redhill in Surrey, Linnell resumed landscape painting. Many of his later pictures had literal or implied religious subject matter, and although they were not always successful commercially, they established Linnell as one of the masters of the pastoral landscape tradition in the nineteenth century.",
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"sortable_date": 1816,
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"updated_at": "2026-05-29 08:41:01.566000"
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