Amitié

This dashing young officer wears a scarlet coat with the blue facings, brass buttons and a gold epaulette over a frilled chemise and stock, his hair powdered.

The portrait is set in the original gold fausee-montre frame that is glazed on the back to show foiled blue glass overlaid with gold stars with two seed pearl borders surrounding a curlicued L draped with a tiny gold link chain and with the sentiment AMITIÉ. A pearl drop to one end of the chain has disappeared and a couple of the tiny strokes that make up ‘amitié’ have been displaced but otherwise the portrait and frame are immaculate. The miniatures is presented in a later, specially commissioned, folding travelling case lined with red velvet and ivory satin.

Andrew Plimer (1763-1837) was the son of a Shropshire clockmaker, a trade he and his older brother were expected to assume to. But the two boys had different ideas and so ran away from home to travel with a gypsy menagerie. The boys painted the vans and the scenery and were not above stealing decorators’ paints as and when they could! Finding themselves in Buckingham after a couple of years on the road, they left the troupe to walk to London where Andrew had the good fortune to be taken on as a studio assistant to the famed miniature painter Richard Cosway. He, recognising the young man’s budding talent, arranged painting lessons for him. Plimer set up his own studio in 1785 and exhibited at the Royal Academy between 1786 and 1830.