An Unknown Woman thumbnail 1
An Unknown Woman thumbnail 2
Image of Gallery in South Kensington
On display at V&A South Kensington
Portrait Miniatures, Room 90a, The International Music and Art Foundation Gallery

An Unknown Woman

Portrait Miniature
ca. 1615 (painted)
Artist/Maker
Place of origin

This modest work is an important early miniature portrait by John Hoskins, who originally trained as an oil painter. This work is datable to about 1615 and shows the still dominant influence of Nicholas Hilliard (1547-1619). The red curtain background is typical for this time, a development of the flat blue background of Elizabethan (later 16th-century) miniatures. Red paint is laid in flat, but the artist then used a wet brush to lift the red paint in strokes, giving the effect of folds in a curtain. Hoskins has also painted the woman's pearl earring using Hilliard's jewelling technique. This involved laying on a raised blob of white lead paint with some shadowing to one side. This was then crowned with a rounded touch of real silver that was burnished with, to quote Hilliard, ‘a pretty little tooth of some ferret or stoat or other wild little beast’. This brought the silver to a sparkling highlight, while actual gold is used to paint the pearl’s gold setting. Silver tarnishes with age, and so this pearl now appears black. Twenty years later Hoskins was painting pearls and gold in a more painterly fashion, using white and yellow paint rather than actual gold or silver. This change was influenced by Charles I's court painter, Anthony van Dyck, who arrived in London from Antwerp in 1632.


Object details

Categories
Object type
TitleAn Unknown Woman (generic title)
Materials and techniques
Watercolour on vellum put down on pasteboard
Brief description
Portrait miniature of an unknown woman, watercolour on vellum, painted by John Hoskins, ca.1615.
Physical description
Portrait, head and shoulders, to front, of a woman with long loose hair, wearing a ruff and a low cut embroidered jacket; in her left ear she wears a pearl earring. Features delicately stippled in grey with some yellow hatching in the shadows, on a pale thick carnation ground; the hair in long wiry strokes over a pale opaque yellow wash; the dress and white ruff in pale brown embossed with white and with touches of metallic gold and silver; background a crimson curtain flooded wet-in - wet; a gold marginal strip; on vellum put down on pasteboard.

Frame: A relatively modern oval complex bolection moulding of fruitwood, stained dark brown; a Simple brown hanger stapled to the back.
Dimensions
  • Height: 49.5mm
  • Width: 39.5mm
Dimensions taken from John Murdoch Seventeenth-century English Miniatures in the collection of the Victoria and Albert Museum. London: The Stationery Office, 1997.
Styles
Marks and inscriptions
'IH' (Signed in gold, centre left)
Credit line
Purchased with funds from the R. H. Stephenson Bequest
Object history
Provenance: H E Backer, from whom purchased with funds from the R H Stephenson Bequest, August 1942.
Subjects depicted
Summary
This modest work is an important early miniature portrait by John Hoskins, who originally trained as an oil painter. This work is datable to about 1615 and shows the still dominant influence of Nicholas Hilliard (1547-1619). The red curtain background is typical for this time, a development of the flat blue background of Elizabethan (later 16th-century) miniatures. Red paint is laid in flat, but the artist then used a wet brush to lift the red paint in strokes, giving the effect of folds in a curtain. Hoskins has also painted the woman's pearl earring using Hilliard's jewelling technique. This involved laying on a raised blob of white lead paint with some shadowing to one side. This was then crowned with a rounded touch of real silver that was burnished with, to quote Hilliard, ‘a pretty little tooth of some ferret or stoat or other wild little beast’. This brought the silver to a sparkling highlight, while actual gold is used to paint the pearl’s gold setting. Silver tarnishes with age, and so this pearl now appears black. Twenty years later Hoskins was painting pearls and gold in a more painterly fashion, using white and yellow paint rather than actual gold or silver. This change was influenced by Charles I's court painter, Anthony van Dyck, who arrived in London from Antwerp in 1632.
Bibliographic references
  • Murdoch, John. Seventeenth-century English Miniatures in the collection of the Victoria and Albert Museum. London: The Stationery Office, 1997.
  • Victoria and Albert Museum, Department of Engraving, Illustration and Design and Department of Paintings, Accessions 1942, London: HMSO, 1955.
Collection
Accession number
P.6-1942

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Record createdFebruary 24, 2003
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