Sarah Goodridge (1788–1853) - Beauty Revealed (1828, Watercolor on ivory, 6,7cm x 8cm, New York City Metropolitan Museum of Art Collection)
Beauty Revealed (1828) was painted by the American artist Sarah Goodridge (1788-1853). And while Sarah Goodridge primarily painted neat and relatively conventional portraits, and she was quite successful at that, this was a little fun project of her. It is painted in watercolor on top of ivory, and it only measures 6.7 × 8 cm (2.6 × 3.1 in). It supposedly is a self-portrait of Sarah Goodridge at age 40, and she made it for her friend and statesman Daniel Webster. She sent this work to Webster after his first wife passed away, and she may have had some interests in marrying him. The painting did not completely convince him as Webster would eventually marry someone else, though the two of them remained friends throughout their lifes. She focused only on the breasts, and to emphasize this she added a white cloth around them to not include other “distracting” parts of the body. It is reasonable to assume that the painting was only intended for Webster’s eyes, and his family held on to the painting until 1981, when they sold it, and it eventually ended up in the collection of the Metropolitan Museum of Art
