George Engleheart Mrs. Boulton 1812 Victoria & Albert Museum George Engleheart Portrait of a Woman 1780s Victoria & Albert Museum This group of English portrait miniatures by George Engleheart (1752-1829) might easily be taken to represent the cast of an Austen novel. The social and even familial similarities among these mild, composed faces seem stronger and far more significant than individual variations based on relative trivialities like gender and age. Austen, or even Thackeray (but not Dickens) would have comprehended the specific social niches occupied by each of these represented persons with an accuracy and detail that can never be recovered now, not even imaginatively. Yet in the realm of inescapable ignorance – where all citizens of the present age must dwell – there is still a perceptible difference between portraits of people from the past whose names are remembered and portraits of people whose names are lost. The faces without names seem more decisively suspended in aspic. George Engleheart John Dyer Collier c. 1785 Victoria & Albert Museum George Engleheart Portrait of a Woman c. 1805 Victoria & Albert Museum George Engleheart Portrait of a Man c. 1800 Victoria & Albert Museum George Engleheart Portrait of a Woman 1775 Victoria & Albert Museum George Engleheart Colonel Cuppage c. 1805 Victoria & Albert Museum George Engleheart Portrait of a Woman c. 1800 Victoria & Albert Museum George Engleheart Portrait of a Girl 1807 Victoria & Albert Museum George Engleheart Sir Thomas Stepney 1785 Victoria & Albert Museum George Engleheart Mrs. Peter De Lancey (Elizabeth Colden) 1783 Metropolitan Museum of Art George Engleheart Self-portrait ca. 1803 National Portrait Gallery (U.K.)
