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| Object search: pinky |
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| | Sarah Goodin Barrett Moulton: "Pinkie"
1794
| Sitter: Sarah Goodin Barrett Moulton
British, 1783 - 1795
| Maker: Thomas Lawrence
British, 1769-1830
| 58 1/4 x 40 1/4 in. (148 x 102.2 cm.)
| oil on canvas
| The Huntington Library, Art Collections, and Botanical Gardens
| | Sarah Goodin Barrett Moulton was born on March 22, 1783 at Little River, St. James's, Jamaica, the eldest child and only daughter of Elizabeth (Barrett) (1763-1830) of Cinnamon Hill, Jamaica, and Charles Moulton (d.1819) of Madeira, a merchant. She was named for her mother's younger sister, Sarah Goodin Barrett, who had died in 1781 at the age of seven, but her extended family preferred to call her by the diminutive nickname, "Pinkie." By 1789 her father had left Jamaica, having separated from his wife, and Sarah and her siblings were raised by their mother and her wealthy relations. Descendants of Hersey Barrett, who had served with the Parliamentary forces that conquered Jamaica in 1655, the Barretts prospered as exporters of rum and sugar cane; by the mid eighteenth century they owned over 84,000 acres and 2,000 slaves. Like many colonial families in the Caribbean, they were eager for their children to acquire the patina of English manners and education. During a visit to London in 1791, Sarah's grandfather Edward Barrett (d.1798) indentured Francis Murphy to tutor his four Moulton grandchildren in Jamaica for a four-year term. Murphy had arrived by February 1792, but in late September Sarah sailed for England with two of her brothers. In England, she joined other children of Jamaican colonial families in attending Mrs. Fenwicks school at Flint House, Greenwich. She had just recovered from a troublesome cough in September 1794, when her brother came down with whooping cough. This illness may have contributed to her death at Greenwich on April 23, 1795. She was buried on April 30 in the parish church of St. Alfege, Greenwich. Her portrait by Thomas Lawrence had already been submitted to the Royal Academy exhibition, which opened the following day.
Thomas Lawrence's portrait of eleven-year-old Sarah Goodin Barrett Moulton, now best known by the sitter's nickname, Pinkie, illustrates the variety of expectations that shaped portraiture in Georgian Britain. The painting originated with the separation of young Sarah Moulton from her maternal grandmother (and godmother), Judith Barrett (1742-1804), who pined for the girl after she was sent from Jamaica to England to be educated at the age of nine. On November 16, 1793 fourteen months after the child's departure, Barrett wrote to her niece, Elizabeth Barrett Williams (1754-1834) of Richmond Hill, Surrey, with an urgent request: "I become every day more desirous to see my dear little Pinky; but as I cannot gratify myself with the Original, I must beg the favor of you to have her picture drawn at full length by one of the best Masters, in an easy Careless [i.e., carefree] attitude." Having specified the high quality of the painter, the ambitious format of the painting, and the relaxed attitude of the sitter, Barrett gave her niece a free hand with other aspects of the portrait. "As your Taste & Judgment cannot be excell'd, I leave her Dress to you," she wrote, adding "Let the frame be handsome & neat.... When it comes, we shall then have an opp[ortunit]y. of seeing your Elegant Taste." The reiterated allusions to Williams's good taste suggest that the commission placed her reputation on the line as much as the artist's.
Her selection of Thomas Lawrence as "one of the best Masters" of portraiture in 1793 was not surprising. Though still in his early twenties, Lawrence was rising rapidly to the pinnacle of his profession. In 1791 he was elected an Associate of the Royal Academy; in 1792 he was appointed Painter in Ordinary to the King (replacing the recently deceased Joshua Reynolds); and on February 10, 1794 (the day before Elizabeth Williams received Judith Barrett's letter from Jamaica) he was elected a full Academician. However, Lawrence did not then possess the high reputation as a painter of children that he was later to acquire. He had yet to paint a full-length portrait of a child, although he had executed several charming heads and two dramatic half-lengths of boys, Arthur Atherley of 1791-92 and Arthur Annesley of 1790-95. In each of those pictures, the subject is represented as a monumental presence looming before an epic sky and confronting the viewer directly with an earnest stare.
Lawrence would repeat this masculine formula at full-length in his portrait of Sarah Moulton, adopting a startlingly low horizon which sets his subject against flying clouds and a breathtaking, panoramic vista receding into infinity. It has been suggested that the scene is set at Richmond Hill, near Elizabeth Williams's home, or at Greenwich, where Sarah attended school. However, it is just as likely to be an imaginary or composite view, created solely for dramatic effect. Indeed, the astonishing theatricality of Lawrence's presentation has led to the hyperbolic identification of Pinkie as "the first British Romantic portrait." It is not quite that, but it is certainly the first to present a young girl in such a stirring, grandiose manner. Lawrence's radical departure from the norm is illustrated through comparison of Pinkie with the same artist's portrait of Emily de Visme, another outdoor full-length portrait of c.1794 showing a young girl in a white gown with pink sash, adjusting her pink-ribboned bonnet. Enclosed snugly within the rising terrain of a wooded landscape, her seated figure anchored by her spreading skirt, Emily de Visme appears safe, static, and grounded. Sarah Moulton, by contrast, stands on the brink of a precipice, a vitally unstable figure whose skirts swirl about her as she pivots on a single pointed toe.
X-radiographs reveal that Lawrence developed this daring conception of Pinkie rather belatedly, only after the painting was fairly well advanced in a more static mode. As originally conceived, the girl was apparently more passive. A single hat ribbon dangled limply to her left shoulder and her skirt fell to the ground without agitation. In order to re-cast the painting in a more dramatic and vivacious manner, Lawrence added lift to the figure, raising two wayward hat ribbons which now flutter freely in the breeze. His hard-edged brushwork chisels out each twist and bend in the glittering pink satin ribbons, but allows the ends to trail away to nothingness, dissolving imperceptibly into the blue sky. A gust of wind similarly kicks up the layered white muslin skirts, whipping them into a filmy, chiffon cloud, which Lawrence's crisp brushwork prevents from dissolving into formlessness. The actual clouds in the sky are crystallized with equal decision, and the plants in the foreground are dashed in with exuberant flashes of color. Analyzing the sense of restless motion conveyed by the portrait, Robert R. Wark has described it as "essentially an elaborate linear study in compound sinuous curves, moving both over the surface of the painting and into suggested depth."
Lawrence's conception of Pinkie evolved alongside another painting of a little girl, which he was working on simultaneously. His Royal Academy diploma picture (required in order to gain official admission as an Academician) was A Gipsy Girl, painted between his election on February 10 and the picture's submission in late November 1794. For all the differences between the feral gypsy and Pinkie, the precociously elegant and refined daughter of Caribbean wealth and privilege, the two girls bear an uncanny physical resemblance to one another. In addition to the marked similarity of their features and heart-shaped faces, Lawrence has given them the same tousled hair and disconcertingly earnest, staring gaze, without a hint of a smile in the mouth or eyes. Both are represented as elements of nature: the swarthy gipsy girl melts into the gloom of the forest, while Pinkie in her fluttering white skirts anthropomorphizes the wind-tossed clouds behind her.
Although at opposite ends of the social spectrum, Pinkie and the gipsy girl are made to exemplify the romantic ideal of the "child of nature," popularized in England through the writings of the French philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau (1712-1778). Like Rousseau, Lawrence posits a spiritual proximity between the natural world and the child's native simplicity. But whereas the mysterious gipsy girl--half naked and clutching a chicken to her breast--is associated with the dangerous savagery of nature, Pinkie retains only its freedom and freshness. Her dance step demonstrates that she is learning the codes of polite behavior, literally going through the motions dictated by respectable society. Stepping off her trailing right toe and advancing onto her left, with her left arm held out before her and her right bent behind her back, she appears to channel the wind's momentum into an elegant pirouette. Dancing was one of the arts in which elite young ladies were educated, and Lawrence's portrait enables her to demonstrate for her grandmother the civilized refinements she has attained in England.
In Pinkie, Lawrence seems to be straddling a dialectic between the well-nurtured orderliness of Emily de Visme and the natural anarchy of The Gypsy Girl. He is also seeking a middle ground between youthful innocence and adult experience. Lawrence added an extra section of canvas at the bottom of the picture in order to extend the girl's swirling skirt and dancing feet into this area. The elongation of the lower anatomy was a standard means of flattering adult subjects by enhancing the slenderness of their proportions. It is a striking feature, for example, in the most successful portrait that Lawrence had painted to date, that of Elizabeth Farren, exhibited at the Royal Academy in 1790 (Metropolitan Museum of Art). In children's portraiture, however, this falsification of proportions was a rarity. If anything, a child's diminutive stature was emphasized through an overall roundness of form and largeness of the head in relation to the body. Lawrence's belated changes to the present canvas suggest his confusion as to whether his pre-pubescent subject should be treated as a child or a young woman.
In its final state, the painting calls attention to the girl's body in a precociously erotic manner. The sensuous layering of muslin in the dress, unusual in a child's costume, derives from Lawrence's adult female portraits, such as Lady Louisa Manners of the same year (Cleveland Museum of Art). The pressure of the wind against the fabric clearly defines the contours of the girl's calf, knee, and thigh. More subtly, the arm raised across Sarah's upper torso (which Lawrence emphasized through the violet-gray shadow cast over her chest and the pink carnation reflected in the white fabric) conceals her breasts but also calls attention to them, in the time-honored manner of the Venus Pudicitia. As David Solkin has observed, this tension between concealment and exposure is modeled on adult female portraiture, in which beauty is exposed in order to be appreciated, but contained so as not to be dangerous.
The alterations that Lawrence made to this portrait were radical and unusual enough to have required the intervention of his patron. Thinking of her aunt's desire to see Pinkie "in an easy Careless attitude," Elizabeth Williams might well have urged Lawrence to introduce the vivacious movement and windswept atmosphere, but it is more difficult to account for the portrait's increased eroticization. The application of adult body concepts to eleven-year-old Sarah Moulton was, like her sophisticated dancing, presumably intended as flattering evidence of maturity, notwithstanding her grandmother's desire for an image of her "dear little Pinkie." Perhaps the heightened body-consciousness was licensed by the idiosyncratic taste of Lawrence's Creole patrons, the Barretts, who are known to have shared the more open and permissive attitudes toward sexuality that pertained in Jamaican colonial society.
In her original letter commissioning this painting, Judith Barrett had emphasized the urgency of her desire for a likeness of her granddaughter. It is likely that the girl began sitting to Lawrence soon after receipt of that letter in mid February 1794. The price of the frame had been determined by September 1 (approximately 12 guineas), and paid for, along with the portrait itself (probably slightly more than Lawrence's standard charge for a half-length canvas, 80 guineas), by the end of October 1794. The changes latterly required by this painting slowed his progress at a crucial moment in his career. According to family legend, Lawrence demanded further payment for Pinkie which the girl's grandfather, Edward Barrett, refused to concede. Lawrence postponed delivery of the portrait in order to display it in the Royal Academy exhibition that opened in May 1795. His difficulty in completing works that year made it all the more important to hold onto Pinkie; as it happened, three of his paintings arrived late at the Academy. A year after its completion the picture had yet to reach Jamaica. Elizabeth Williams's sister wrote to her on October 12, 1795, "poor Pinkey's picture has never been heard of--Hibberts [the Barretts' London agent] says it never was sent to his house he knows nothing of it." It remains uncertain whether the painting ever went to Jamaica, but it ultimately entered the collection of Pinkie's younger brother, Edward (1785-1857), father of the poet Elizabeth Barrett Browning.
The critics passed over Pinkie at the 1795 Royal Academy without comment, as did Joseph Farington who visited Lawrence's studio just prior to the exhibition. The low value placed on the portrait as late as 1857 is indicated by the total price of £93 placed that year on Edward Moulton-Barrett's entire collection of family portraits, which included Pinkie. Thereafter, even allowing for inflation, the painting enjoyed a meteoric rise in perceived value. In 1873, it was exchanged for £1000 between members of the Moulton-Barrett family, and when it was finally sold out of the family in 1910 (on the heels of two public exhibitions), it commanded a price of nearly £40,000. In 1926 Duveen re-acquired Pinkie for 74,000 guineas, the highest price ever paid for a painting at auction. It was then displayed for two weeks at the Royal Society of Portrait Painters and attracted several thousand visitors. Shortly thereafter, Duveen sold the painting at cost to Henry E. Huntington. Cult status was confirmed in 1928, when the painting was reproduced on a Cadbury's chocolate tin. The previous year, a commentator had articulated the source of the painting's phenomenal popular appeal, noting that it "holds in combination ideal qualities of youth, so that the picture is more than a portrait of a certain child--she is childhood itself."
|  | | | Accession No. 27.61
| Member of these exhibitions:
Great British Paintings from American Collections
| Provenance:
Painted for the sitter's grandmother, Judith Barrett; to her grandson (the sitter's brother), Edward Barrett Moulton-Barrett, 1804; by bequest to his youngest son, Charles John Moulton-Barrett, 1857; sold to Elizabeth Moulton-Barrett (wife of his youngest brother Octavius Moulton Barrett, of Park Street, Grosvenor Square, and Westover, Calbourne, Isle of Wight), 1873; sold to Agnew, March 10, 1910, who sold a half-share to Duveen; sold to Herbert Stern, 1st Baron Michelham of Hellingly, Sussex, Strawberry Hill, and Princes Gate, 1910; to his wife, Lady Aimée Geraldine Michelham (later Mrs. Frederick Almy of Long Island), 1919; her sale, Hampton and Son, November 24, 1926 (288),purchased by Duveen; acquired by Henry E. Huntington, 1927
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