Physical description
Portrait of a girl, half-length, facing to front. Features softly hatched and stippled in brown and sanguine, modelled with blue and grey, with red for the lips and black in the eyes with highlights of white, on a warm creamy carnation; hair in pale brown wash, worked over in darker colour, some lights in pale grey and touches of pink at the hair-line; dress in ochre wash, modelled in two shades of brown with white and grey heightening; chemise in white shaded with grey, brown and blue; background in pale grey, washed and hatched over in darker colour, and lightened behind and around the head; on vellum put down on a leaffrom a table-book.
Frame: An oval frame, turned ebony of bolection moulding with additional grooves at the outer and inner edges; the inner ring possibly made separately; the convex glass set in a rebate; a plain brass ring for the hanger, with traces of original gilding, held by a pin driven through the wood at the top; inscribed in ink on an old label attached to the paper cover of the backing: Miss Catherine/North, in the same hand as on P.42-1987.
Place of Origin
England, Great Britain (painted)
Date
ca. 1690 (painted)
Artist/maker
Ashfield, Edmund (artist)
Materials and Techniques
Watercolour on vellum lput down on a leaf from a table-book.
Marks and inscriptions
'2'
Dimensions
Height: 76 mm, Width: 62 mm
Object history note
Provenance:Until 1690, Charles, 5th Baron North de Kirtling; until 1734, William, 6th Baron; his wife, Maria Margareta (born ‘de jonge van Ellemete’). who married secondly in 1735 Patrick Murray, 5th Lord Elibank; his illegitimate son Patrick Murray of Simprim, Forfarshire (d.c.1854); his daughter Maria Margaretta (d.1873) who married in 1842 James, Baron Talbot de Malahide; her eldest daughter Susan-Ann, who married in 1864 Cecil St John Ives, subsequently Major-General; their second daughter Marion who married her third husband in 1923, Godfrey Waiter, 2nd Baron Phillimore; she died in 1950; the miniatures sold to the Museum by private treaty with two of her heirs, 1987.
Descriptive line
Portrait miniature of the Hon. Catherine North when a child, watercolour on vellum by Edmund Ashfield, ca.1690.
Bibliographic References (Citation, Note/Abstract, NAL no)
John Murdoch, Seventeenth-century English Miniatures in the Collection of the Victoria & Albert Museum, London: The Stationery Office in association with the Victoria & Albert Museum, 1997.
Cat. 133, p.232. Full Citation:
“133 The Hon. Catherine North
(d.c.1695)
c.1690
P43-1987
Oval 76 x 62 mm
Features softly hatched and stippled in brown and sanguine, modelled with blue and grey, with red for the lips and black in the eyes with highlights of white, on a warm creamy carnation; hair in pale brown wash, worked over in darker colour, some lights in pale grey and touches of pink at the hair-line; dress in ochre wash, modelled in two shades of brown with white and grey heightening; chemise in white shaded with grey, brown and blue; background in pale grey, washed and hatched over in darker colour, and lightened behind and around the head; on vellum put down on a leaf from a table-book.
Condition: Vellum lifting at the lower left edge with consequent local flaking of the white robe; otherwise excellent.
Signed: Not signed. Inscribed in silver-point on the back: 2.
Frame: As for Cat. No. 131; inscribed in ink on an old label attached to the paper cover of the backing: Miss Catherine/North, in the same hand as on Cat. No. 131.
Provenance: As for Cat. No. 131.
Catherine, whose date of birth is not recorded, was the elder surviving daughter of Charles, 5th Baron North (see Cat. No. 131). According to Roger North (1) she 'died at sea, coming from Barbadoes', which implies that she may have gone there with her mother after the death of her father in 1690. Her mother, by that time married to Colonel Russell, died in 1695. Catherine had no children.
1 North 1890, vol. I (author's preface), p. vii. See also Jessop's expanded but somewhat unreliable account of the orphaned children in vol. III, pp. 292, 294-5, in which Dudleya (Cat. No. 135) is stated to be the elder daughter.”
Materials
Watercolour; Vellum
Techniques
Painting
Subjects depicted
Child; Girl; North, Catherine (The Hon.)
Categories
Portraits; Children & Childhood; Paintings
Collection code
PDP
