Beauty Revealed: Sarah Goodridge

Beauty Revealed, by Sarah Goodridge (USA) 1828

Beauty Revealed

It was a century or so before the suffragettes achieved voting rights for women in Massachusetts, with the landmark ratification of the 19th amendment. And it was half a century before the most famous of Boston painters, John Singer Sargent, (who was not actually from Boston), scandalized the Paris art world with that infamous slip of a strap on Madame Gautreau’s evening gown, immortalizing her as Madame X. The New England region was, of course, steeped in Puritan history, the derogatory term given to the early American colonists seeking freedom from Protestant persecution in Europe. The Puritans had a reputation for being dour, stodgy, and prudish. 

This was the social context in 1828 which 40-year-old artist and “spinster” Sarah Goodridge painted her naked breasts. The miniature portraitist wore the severe, heavy clothing of women of her time and region, but privately stripped naked and created one of history’s most remarkable paintings, a self-portrait. The tiny work of art, measuring around 3 by 2.5 inches, is a delicate rendering in watercolour on ivory, of Sarah’s own breasts, idealized stark white teacups with rosebud nipples, swaddled by swathes of white fabric. They look remarkably close to the classical Greek and Roman sculptures of Venus and Aphrodite, unblemished but for the personal touch of a pale mole just under her right collarbone. 
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Goodridge specialized in portrait miniatures and had painted various public figures and well to do personalities, operating her own studio in Boston. This particular miniature was one that she presented herself as a gift to Daniel Webster, a politician who had sat for her, after he was widowed. 

Miniature jewelry portraits on brooches and pendants of a lover’s eye had been recently popular in Europe. And erotic miniature paintings surface from their secret drawers throughout art history, from all cultures, European, Persian, Indian, Mexican, Peruvian, and beyond, some of them extremely explicit. Human desire and beauty is of course an evergreen theme in our story, and miniatures are more suited to discretion and economy than large-scale works.  

But a woman artist’s own depiction of her assets, deliberated gifted to a man she admired, was something extraordinary. The determination behind such an action, and the confident expression of desire, was unique. It is quite likely that Sarah had remained single on purpose to protect her vocation as an artist. Perhaps at forty, past the years when pregnancy would distract her from her true purpose, she set her sights on a man that she believed saw her as an equal, in hopes of marriage. Perhaps the token was purely unabashed eroticism: a sext, if you will, a secret, an invitation.

In any event, Webster remarried someone else, a woman of more means, some said. Whether he otherwise responded to her call is uncertain. He wrote over forty letters to Sarah and posed for her again, and Sarah visited him in Washington, DC. Whether she simply accepted his choices and gladly resumed their friendship, or if they were also lovers, is a matter of speculation. We all have this story, don’t we, an occasion where we chanced revelation, bared our breasts or our teeth or our soul. The risk of such a situation is always uncertain, sometimes leading to what we wanted and sometimes leading to something unexpected, or to nothing at all. Risk happens, and the various outcomes shape us, as do our personal choices. Most of us don’t have writers and museum folk prying in to our private text messages or rendezvous.

We do not know exactly what transpired in the hearts or loins of Sarah or Daniel after the gift of this Beauty Revealed. But we do know this: now part of the permanent collection at The Metropolitan Museum of Art, Webster kept the gift until the day he died, the ivory gently worn from his touch.

Lorette C. Luzajic