Image source: Wikimedia Commons (Public domain). View source
Pinkie (Sarah Barrett Moulton)
Thomas Lawrence · Rococo & Neoclassicism
- Artist
- Thomas Lawrence (1769–1830)
- Date
- 1794
- Dimensions
- 146 x 100.3 cm
- Medium
- Oil on canvas
- Location
- Huntington Art Museum, San Marino, California, United States
Pinkie shows an eleven-year-old girl in a white dress with a fluttering pink sash and bonnet ribbons, standing on a hilltop against a stormy sky. She seems to walk towards us through the wind, looking down at us with a slight smile.
A closer look
The girl was Sarah Barrett Moulton, nicknamed Pinkie, born in Jamaica to a family of plantation owners. She was sent to school in England, and her grandmother commissioned the portrait because she missed her. Lawrence, then only twenty-five, captured her with dazzling, fluid brushwork, the light silk of her dress and ribbons rippling against the dark clouds and low horizon. Sadly, Sarah died the following year, aged twelve. Her brother's family later became the Barretts of Wimpole Street, and the poet Elizabeth Barrett Browning was her niece.