Like John Smibert (B.72.7, B.72.8), English artist John Wollaston became an immediate success in colonial America and was celebrated in the local press—a sign of the rising status of the artist in colonial culture. During his career in New York, Wollaston painted approximately seventy-five portraits, only three of which are signed and dated. This portrait, although not signed by the artist, bears an inscription on the reverse identifying the sitter as Mrs. Margaret Nicholls, her age as fifty, and the date of execution as 1749. Since 1749 was the first year in which Wollaston traveled to the colonies and began painting the New York gentry, Mrs. Nicholls (Margaret Tudor, 1699–1772) would have been among Wollaston’s earliest colonial sitters.

The first published notice of the sitter is of her death. Her obituary reads: “Last Saturday Night departed this Life, greatly lamented, Mrs. Margaret Nichols, the amiable Consort of Richard Nichols, Esq: of this City, in the 73d Year of her Age. Her Remains were last Monday Evening decently interred in the Family Vault, in Trinity Church Yards.” Margaret was married in 1720 to Richard Nicholls (d. 1775), a prominent New York attorney, coroner, postmaster, and vestryman of Trinity Church from 1732 to 1766. They had at least five children: Mary (d. 1797; first married Thomas Tucker, then the Reverend Samuel Auchmuty, who also sat to Wollaston); Elizabeth (1725–1774; married Alexander Colden, whose family also sat for Wollaston); William Robert (d. before 1775); Jane (married George Harrison); and Susannah (first married John Burgess).

This painting is among the most appealing and brilliantly painted of the artist’s New York smaller-format portraits. He repeated this compositional format in many of his portraits of women: the sitter, her face partially cast in shadow, is set within a painted oval. A frilly lace cap surrounds her face, a lace fichu covers her chest, and the silky, buff-colored satins of her dress shimmer against the dark background. Wollaston’s signature oval, half-lidded eyes, and delicate, upturned mouth are present here, as is his attention to detail in picking out with tiny brushstrokes the patterns of crisp lace in cap and fichu and broadly painting the dramatic highlights of the sitter’s dress. This portrait format was evidently successful, for wealthy and fashionable New Yorkers thronged to Wollaston’s studio to have their likenesses painted.

Related examples: Wollaston followed a similar format for most of his New York portraits. Notable related examples include Susannah Marshall, c. 1749, Vose Galleries, as of 1975; Mrs. Joseph Reade, c. 1749–52, MMA; Mrs. Cadwallader Colden, c. 1749–52, MMA; and Mrs. Ebenezer Pemberton, c. 1749–51, RISD. For an example of an English precedent, see Allan Ramsay’s portrait of his first wife, Anne Bayne, c. 1739–40, Scottish National Portrait Gallery, Edinburgh.

Book excerpt: David B. Warren, Michael K. Brown, Elizabeth Ann Coleman, and Emily Ballew Neff. American Decorative Arts and Paintings in the Bayou Bend Collection. Houston: Princeton Univ. Press, 1998.