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The Identity of the Sitter

This is a half-length portrait of a young woman in a domestic interior in three-quarter profile to the right and wearing a dark orange dress with orange-red vertical stripes and buttoned high at the neck. She also wears a blue-green hat. Her hair appears to be red. One would think the identification of the sitter as Maria Wheeler must be correct because the artist’s younger daughter Helen Martineau bequeathed the picture. This model looks somewhat different, however, from the sitter in the portrait of Maria Wheeler Martineau at the Manchester Art Galleries. Here the model’s hair is definitely dark brown and not red. This model also looks older and the Martineau’s were only married for four years before the artist died so perhaps the portrait of Maria now at Oxford was done prior to their marriage? Both sitters appear to share the same colour of blue eyes, and similar shapes of their noses and chins, despite being painted from different angles with the one being a frontal portrait and the other a three-quarter profile. The intimate study at Manchester looks more like a conventional portrait while the one at Oxford looks like a genre painting. Are the differences between the two portraits simply artistic license featuring the same sitter several years apart or has the sitter from the Oxford portrait somehow been misidentified? — Dennis T. Lanigan

Links to Related Material

• Bibliography of Criticism and Related Scholarship

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Last modified 22 January 2022