A Tasselled Necklace

This finely painted and gilded silhouette depicts an elegant young lady in an empire-line dress tied on the high waist with a ribbon bow. Her gold chain necklace is hung with tassels and her hair is swept up in a fashionable Apollo knot secured with a comb.

The silhouette is set in a traditional original papier-mâché frame with convex glass and an attractive leaf and berry hanger. The glass has a light scratch, the frame a small chip to one corner – none of which detracts from the beauty of this piece.

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.