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Some Old Time Beauties - After Portraits by the English Masters, with Embellishment and Comment by Thomson Willing
page 37 of 58 (63%)
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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