Some Old Time Beauties - After Portraits by the English Masters, with Embellishment and Comment by Thomson Willing
page 37 of 58 (63%)
page 37 of 58 (63%)
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Their pictures appeared at the Academy, in 1786. Lavinia was portrayed
as shown in the picture here given, and again in quite as lovely a fashion,--standing out doors and wearing a wide-brimmed hat which casts a broad shade across the face; the wavy curls of hair fall upon the shoulder; in the background is a landscape. The naïvete of the face is exquisitely delightful. The old-time flavor of the whole causes one to recall Locker's lines on the picture of his grandmother:-- "Beneath a summer tree. Her maiden reverie Has a charm; Her ringlets are in taste; What an arm! ... what a waist For an arm!" In the picture of her youngest sister, Anne, is a broad hat, too; she sits full-face, but in her features there is lacking just a little of the quiet dignity of the eldest. All of these portraits have been made familiar to us by the most meritorious mezzotints of them by Cousins. In Lavinia's face there lingers all the enchanting grace of girlhood,--a face yet full of that early beauty-- "Which, like the morning's glow Hints a full day below." A later president of the Academy, Sir Martin Shee, has shown us that face in the noonday of its matronly beauty, and the gentle character and sweet sensibility yet outshine through the mask of the flesh as in the earlier pictures. |
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