Sarah Goodridge And One Of The Earliest Examples Of 'Sending Nudes'
A painting like this is bound to draw anyone in, and also arouse some questions in regard to it's back story. What makes it even more fascinating is that the pale breasts, framed by swirling fabric, were painted by the artist herself, Sarah Goodridge, an accomplished miniaturist born in 1788, on a small ivory plate. The intrigue deepens when you find out that, in 1828, Goodridge sent this particular miniature, carefully enclosed in a leather case with two clasps, to the newly widowed U.S. senator Daniel Webster.
Goodridge’s connection with Webster began a year earlier and lasted until his death in 1852. Though there was an evident attraction between them, their encounters were infrequent. Webster made several trips to Boston to see Goodridge, where he commissioned her to paint portraits of himself and his family. In return, Goodridge visited Webster twice: first in 1828 after the death of his first wife, and later in 1841–42 during his separation from his second wife.
“Whether Webster had any sexual involvement with [Goodridge] cannot be proved one way or the other,” Webster’s biographer Robert Remini says cautiously, before adding: “although the fact that she sent him a self-portrait with her breasts exposed raises suspicions.”
But Beauty Revealed is not a “self-portrait with the [Goodridge’s] breasts exposed”; it’s a self-portrait exclusively of her breasts. As Dr Chelsea Nichols points out, on her blog The Museum of Ridiculously Interesting Things, Goodridge was sending Webster the 19th-century equivalent of “a saucy nudie pic” (which also managed, by hiding her face, to protect her identity from prying, puritanical eyes).
There’s no denying Beauty Revealed is a proto-sext — a sext kept by Webster all his life and donated to the Metropolitan Museum of Art by his descendants. Just as remarkably, though, it’s an artful eroticization of the tradition of “eye miniatures” — said to have begun when George IV wanted to send his beloved Maria Anne Fitzherbert a token of his affection.
Eye miniatures — which were also typically painted on small sheets of ivory — acted as a substitute for the gaze of the absent beloved. Beauty Revealed, of course, acted as a substitute for something else. Like the miniature portraits Goodridge painted for hire, this picture of her bare breasts was meant to be treasured, touched and to arouse.
John Updike, in his 1993 essay “The Revealed and the Concealed”, suggests that Goodridge sent Webster Beauty Revealed as an erotic “offer”, as though to say: “Come to us, and we will comfort you… We are yours for the taking, in all our ivory loveliness, with our tenderly stippled nipples”. If this was the case, Updike continues, “the offer…was not taken. Webster needed not just love but money.” In May of 1829 he courted the wealthy Catherine Van Renssalaer, and when that didn’t work out turned to Caroline Le Roy, the daughter of a prominent New York merchant, whom he soon married. Goodridge remained single all her life.
In Dr. Nichols' post she suggests that Goodridge’s self-portrait is not a sexual offering but “the confidence and passions of a woman way ahead of her time, who has proudly embraced the eroticism of her body and role as cherished mistress”. She also suggests that Goodridge may well never have married deliberately, because she wanted to retain her independence as an artist at a time when being an artist was far from an easy thing for a woman to do.
Comments