Bellezza rivelata

In 1828 the senator Daniel Webster had just lost his wife, and a Boston miniaturist he had known for years, Sarah Goodridge, sent him a small gift. It fits in the palm of a hand, barely three inches across, and it shows a pair of bared breasts framed in white cloth. Goodridge was 40 and painted it as a self-portrait, on a wafer of ivory thin enough that light passes through and makes the skin seem to glow. The two had exchanged dozens of letters, and this was almost certainly a private proposal, an offer she was making in the most direct way she could. Webster did not marry her. He married another woman the following year, kept the miniature, and Goodridge left him her paintbox when she died.