Object Description
This fashionable young Lady would have been captured in enamel by Zincke in circa 1735. She wears a small black hat adorned with a white feather and around her neck a ruff, showing the revival in seventeenth-century costume which was on trend in this period. Originally, the portrait may have been painted to be set into a snuff box. The habit of taking snuff was common place all over Europe by the eighteenth century, and it was thought to be a harmless, if not actively heathy activity.
Christian Friedrich Zincke was born in Dresden to a family of goldsmiths and after training in his home town, he relocated to London at the invitation of Charles Boit, then the leading practitioner of enamelling in Europe. For some time he worked alongside Boit, but when he fled England to escape his creditors in 1714, Zincke monopolised the market.
Zincke’s output was prolific and although his eyesight began to deteriorate during the 1720s, he was made enamel painter to George II and cabinet painter to Frederick, Prince of Wales in 1732, which increased his patronage further. The present portrait would have been painted around this time, at the height of his career, but he was likely aided by many studio assistants given his failing vision. Unlike other enamellists, many of his portraits were made ad vivum, although he was not averse to flattering his sitters at their request; for example, Queen Caroline demanded that she be made to look twenty-eight when she was in fact forty-nine.
Zincke’s enamels can be found in most significant public and private collections, including The Royal Collection, the Portland collection at Welbeck Abbey, the Victoria and Albert Museum, London, and the Ashmolean Museum, Oxford.