Anne Mee often painted her sitters with overly large eyes to add melodrama and it is this trait that makes her portraits especially recognisable. Traditionally known as Mathilda Fielding, this lady has soulful blue eyes and rosebud lips. Her unruly curls are topped with a turban style headdress that also runs under her chin.The portrait is set in a gold-plated fausee-montre frame, the reverse featuring a delightful memorial miniature showing a young female mourning by an obelisk surrounded by cypress trees symbolically pointing to heaven. Set on a base of chopped hair, the obelisk is painted in yellow and black with touches of red and white and decorated with seed pearls and gold wire. A couple of gold wire strands have slipped within the frame but otherwise the miniatures front and back are fine.Anne Mee was one of only a few female artists working commercially in England during the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century. Having learned to paint whilst helping out in her...