Abstract
In May of 1813, Jane Austen and her brother Henry attended the spring art exhibition of the Royal Academy at Somerset House in London. At the exhibition, one portrait miniature particularly captured her attention and admiration. As she wrote to her sister Cassandra, Austen discovered among the collection
a small portrait of Mrs. Bingley, excessively like her…. I went, in hopes of seeing one of her Sister, but there was no Mrs. Darcy;—perhaps, however, I may find her in the Great Exhibition which we shall go to, if we have time;—I have no chance of her in the collection of Sir Joshua Reynolds’s Paintings which is now shewing in Pall Mall & which we are also to visit.—Mrs. Bingley’s exactly herself, size, shaped face, features, & sweetness; there never was a greater likeness. She is dressed in a white gown, with green ornaments, which convinces me of what I had always supposed, that green was a favourite colour with her. I dare say Mrs. D. will be in Yellow.1
Pride and Prejudice had been published in January, and Austen now had the pleasure of finding a portrait that was exactly how she had imagined he character of Jane Bennet. This portrait miniature is, thus, a minor literary curiosity for scholars of Jane Austen. It is also a minor literary curiosity for another reason as well.
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Notes
Gilchrist, Life of Blake. 51; see also G. E. Bentley, “‘William Blake Flashed Across the Path’ in Snippets, Blake in the Ladies’ Cabinet (1840),” Notes and Queries 58.1 (2011): 71–72.
G. E. Bentley, Blake Records, New Haven: Yale University Press, 2004, 26.
G. E. Bentley, “Blake and Wedgwood,” Blake: An Illustrated Quarterly, 24.1 (1990): 249.
The Complete Poetry and Prose of William Blake, ed. David Erdman. New York: Anchor, 1997, 527.
The Letters of William Blake, Together with a Life by Frederick Tatham, ed. Archibald G. B. Russell. London: Methuen and Company, 1910, 27. Accessed online at: https://archive.org/stream/lettersofwilliam00blak_0/lettersofwilliam00blak_0_djvu.txt.
John Beer, William Blake: A Literary Life, Houndmills, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006, 131.
Mark Crosby, “William Blake’s Portrait Miniatures of the Butts Family,” Blake: An Illustrated Quarterly 42.4 (2009): 147–52.
Morton D. Paley, “William Blake’s ‘Portable Fresco,” European Romantic Review, 24.3 (2012): 271–277.
Tilar J. Mazzeo, “Verbal Echoes of Cumberland’s Thoughts on Outline, Sculpture, and the System that Guided the Ancients (1796) in Jerusalem,” Blake: An Illustrated Quarterly, 35.1 (2001): 24–26. On Blake’s relationship with Cumberland, see also Anne Mellor, Blake’s Human Form Divine, Berkeley: University of California Press, 1974, 114.
George Cumberland, Thoughts on Outline, Sculpture, and the System That Guided the Ancient Artists in Composing Their Figures and Groupes, London, 1796, 8–9.
Ibid., 536.
Ibid., 531.
Letter of April 12, 1827; Complete Poetry and Prose, ed. Erdman, 783–784; Angus Whitehead, “‘This extraordinary performance’: William Blake’s Use of Gold and Silver in the Creation of His Paintings and Illuminated Books,” Blake: An Illustrated Quarterly 42.3 (2009): 84–108; 89, 92.
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© 2016 Tilar J. Mazzeo
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Mazzeo, T.J. (2016). William Blake and the Decorative Arts. In: Fulford, T., Sinatra, M.E. (eds) The Regency Revisited. Nineteenth-Century Major Lives and Letters. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137504494_5
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