The Blue Sash

Although Plimer created beautifully rendered portraits of his own young family, he received relatively few commissions to paint children. This charming example shows a child with soft blonde curls wearing a white dress with a deep blue sash. Blue was apparently a favourite choice for the artist’s palette.

The portrait is in excellent condition and is set in a gold frame that is glazed on the back to show a lock of brown hair arranged on foiled opalescent glass with gold wire ears of corn and seed pearl initials on a blue glass plaque. There is a chip to the glass on the reverse at 5 o’clock; the frame is otherwise in fine condition.

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.