Sarah Goodridge

In 1828 the widowed senator Daniel Webster opened a small package and found a painting on ivory barely three inches wide. It showed a pair of bare breasts wrapped in soft white cloth, and nothing else, no face at all. The painter was Sarah Goodridge, a miniaturist from Massachusetts, and she had made it of herself.

Goodridge painted for a living in Boston, supporting her family with tiny portraits on ivory at a time when very few American women earned money from art. She was largely self-taught, encouraged by the celebrated portraitist Gilbert Stuart, whose own likeness she painted. Webster, a famous orator whose wife had just died, sat for her more than once, and the two were close.

What exactly she meant by the gift is not known, and Webster soon married someone else. He kept the little picture all his life. When he died in 1852 it was still among his belongings, and it eventually passed to the Metropolitan Museum in New York, where it is known as Beauty Revealed.