Dimpled Chin

With her hair in loose unpowdered curls, this delicately featured young lady has deep brown eyes, rosebud lips and a dimpled chin. She is wearing a muslin cross-over dress that has a frilled neckline and is trimmed with yellow ribbon on the sleeves and waistline. The style of her dress dates the portrait to the 1790s.

The miniature is presented in a handsomely chased gold frame that has a glazed aperture on the reverse that shows the initials J J picked out in seed pearls laid on brown hair. Fine condition.

The son of a wealthy Birmingham industrialist, William Armfield Hobday (1771-1831) was accepted into the Royal Academy Schools when he was eighteen years old. He subsequently worked as a portrait artist in London, Bath and Bristol attracting a fashionable clientele. In later years he also became an art dealer with a gallery in Pall Mall. This venture, coupled with an extravagant lifestyle, resulted in bankruptcy just two years before he died.