Janet Tower Storey (1756-1835)

Janet Tower Storey (Aberdeen 1756-1835)

Portrait of woman with headphone

Oil on canvas, cm 76,5 x 64

The painting in question portrays an elderly woman wearing a white cap, which we can identify as the great-aunt of the artist thanks to a cartouche on the back of the canvas that specifies its subject ("great grand-aunt Storey"), the place where the picture was made ("Aberdeen", a Scottish citizen) and the name of the English painter, "Janet Tower Storey" (1756-1835).

The provenance and dating of the painting allow us to reconstruct the context in which our artist worked and the models she had available. Besides the obvious echo of the romantic painting of Théodore Géricault (1791-1824), in particular for the ten Portraits of alienated people (painted between 1822 and 1823, today only ten are preserved at the Musée du Louvre in Paris) in which the looks are emphasized, the expressions, but also the feelings of the characters, and the lessons of artists such as Jacques-Louis David (1748-1825), Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres (1780-1867) and Francesco Hayez (1791-1881), interpreter of his time, scrupulous researcher of truth, of which the portraits of the intellectual aristocracy of his time are eloquent evidence, the influence of some of the greatest English portraitists of the nineteenth century is indisputable.The portrait typology, in fact, from the second half of the seventeenth century was the genre that best suited the aspirations of the middle class, as it is advantageous from an economic point of view, both for the insertion within the environments of the houses of the new bourgeoisie. Among the most renowned and sought-after portraitists in London is Sir Joshua Reynolds (1723-1792), who argued that although the human figure, an animal or even an object were not noble subjects, they could have acquired dignity, Communicate a feeling and produce emotions in the same way as a picture of a historical or mythological subject. His works are now in several private collections, as well as the National Gallery and the National Portrait Gallery in London, the Wallace Collection and other British galleries.

Thomas Gainsborough (1727-1788) was also a renowned portrait painter and landscape painter in England. His portraits show an extraordinary ease of composition and agility of touch, its colors, in contrast with the opaque tones used by Reynolds, with which he contended the most prestigious customers of the city, are clear and sparkling, the very thin and surprising depth of the dough, so that his strokes, short and diagonal, were a "means of infinite artistic possibilities" (A. Popham, 1923).

Our artist, in the intimate portrait of the relative who stares with her gaze outside the canvas, perhaps looking at the same niece when she portrays her, shows us a woman in her everyday life, without ornaments, dressed in dark blue, with a shawl of the same color on the shoulders and a headband that reflects the fashion of his time. The smile and the vivid eyes of the old woman give us a sense of soothing tranquility, but at the same time they make us share in her social condition, probably belonging to the petty bourgeoisie, that has led her to desire at her own dwelling a sign of this status, which she may be passing on as an inheritance to the posterity.

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