A Close Cap

This finely painted and gilded silhouette depicts an elegant lady in an empire-line dress tied on the high waist with a ribbon bow and worn with a columnar fill-in with a narrow ruff. Her curls peep out from under her pretty close cap trimmed with lace rosettes.

The silhouette is set in a traditional original papier-mâché frame with convex glass and a small star hanger. The frame has the usual nibbles to the outside edge.

Biographical details for George Atkinson are scanty. He was born in Lincoln around 1785, married a girl from Durham and fathered six children. As a young man he travelled around as an itinerant artist but by 1817 he had settled in Brighton where he worked for about ten years. By the time of the 1841 census, he and his family were living at 1 London Street in Hackney. By then his children were aged between 8 and 24 with two of the boys having followed in their father’s footsteps by becoming artists.