ALLAN RAMSAY (1713-1784)

A Lady in a Pink Silk Dress (c.1762)

Oil on canvas (76 x 64 cm)

Yale Center for British Art, Connecticut, USA

Allan Ramsay’s portrait of a young woman leaning pensively on a parapet and looking wistfully out at the viewer is one of his most striking and moving works. Combining a delicacy of costume and pose with a realist treatment of the sitter’s features, Ramsay imparts her an elegant, melancholic beauty.

Ramsay’s exceptional skill in capturing his sitters´personality was at the heart of his immense success as a portraitist. Like his close friend William Hogarth, he used the individual physiognomies of his subjects to evince character. Unlike that of Hogarth, however, his realism was tempered by the soft lines, surfaces and tones of the French painting. Artists like Boucher and Jean-Marc Nattier not only used the delicate, luxurious fabrics and textures of their sitters’ clothing and hair adornments to evoke the sensuality and elegance of the women they were painting, but they were also sensitive to those qualities, something impossible for the uncouth Hogarth. Similarly, Ramsay enjoyed the transformation of paint into lace, silk and flowers.

Although Ramsay’s picture is a masterpiece as a whole, there is a detail that is even more telling about the artist’s consummate skill in the rendering of lace or silk and is the beautiful choker made of the finest lace. This ornament, known in France as ras-de-cou , very popular since the mid-XVIIIth century evolved from a simple band of lace worn around the neck and decorated usually with jewellery or flowers to an elaborated frilled neckband.