That’s the idea behind a new exhibition at Kansas City’s Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art: John Smart: Virtuoso in Miniature, on view to January 4, 2026. Taken as a whole, the show offers compelling commentary on global trade and colonization in turn-of-the-nineteenth-century England and India. But close study of any of the palm-sized portraits on display gives a lesson in contemporary fashion (including but not limited to wig care), social climbing aspirations, and artistic trends. The show’s curators have queued up chemical paint analysis (for the science-minded among us), new information on the technical side of painting on ivory, and unearthed biographical information, all to help illuminate the life of English artist John Smart, a portraitist trying to make it in the shadow of Britain’s royal court painting system. There’s even a love story.
But let’s start from the beginning, which, as far as the show is concerned, is Smart’s first stretch working in London, from 1760 to 1784. The earliest works are small in size and artistry. “His subjects are mask-faced with very little sense of character,” says exhibition curator Aimee Marcereau DeGalan. “But placed chronologically, you can see his evolution as an artist.” As his style develops, we begin to see how he got his nickname, “Honest John.” His greatest quality as an artist was perhaps his worst as a businessman: Smart told the truth about his subjects and could be merciless in depicting them. “What he saw is what you got,” DeGalan says. Smart’s portraits offered a kind of antidote to the cotton-candy style of his counterpart Richard Cosway (1742–1821), court painter to George III and George IV. “Cosway was known for his more flamboyant style, a flattering kind of a modern-day airbrush finish. Ergo, John Smart didn’t do court paintings. His clients were merchant class.”
“[And Smart] was calculated. During his stint in London, he developed contacts among the merchants and military. And he followed those people to India,” DeGalan says. “The Honorable East India Company was based in Madras, and as a colonial outpost there was a huge naval presence there, along with a lot of wealth.” In India, from 1785 to 1795, Smart was able to secure commissions from the elites stationed there, and captured the evolution of fashion among them, often moneyed upstarts with an eye on displaying evidence of their affluence. “Miniature is a platform that allows for experimentation. The works are intimate and personal versus the scale of a large oil painting,” DeGalan says. They can showcase moments of fleeting trends in a way that more expensive oil works often did not, and Smart’s work raises sartorial questions this show seeks to answer.
For one: pink wigs? Several sitters wear rose-hued ’dos, which led the curatorial team (DeGalan along with Blythe Sobol and Maggie Keenan) to join forces with the Nelson-Atkins’ objects conservator, Stephanie Spence, and the Mellon Science Research program at the museum led by John Twilley to study if the pink hair was purposeful, or an anomaly of Smart’s pigments and time. We were able to reconstruct the artist’s palette through elemental mapping,” DeGalan says. A tiny flake of paint is studied layer by layer through X-ray fluorescence, a nondestructive technique that produces a map of the chemical elements to reveal Smart’s painting materials and application techniques. In this case, they were hunting for a certain type of aluminum pigment that could fade brown hair to pink over time. “We did not find that pigment,” DeGalan says, leaving open the possibility of a fad for pink powder.
Gift of Mr. and Mrs. John W. Starr.
The curators share their findings in traditional wall labels and an interactive “In the Details” digital portal available on gallery iPads or via scannable QR codes. Visitors can zoom in on incredibly detailed photographs of the miniatures, and examine heads of hair strand by powdered strand. Such investigations even uncovered a few painterly details that allowed the Nelson-Atkins team to identify previously unknown sitters through their physical attributes, findings that will be published in the spring.
Smart was under-researched, DeGalan explains. “There’s a pamphlet from 1971, but there had never been a deep dive.” A digital catalogue published in conjunction with the show covers the 350 pieces of the museum’s Starr Collection of Portrait Miniatures, from which this exhibition was drawn, providing write-ups on each miniature, short biographies on the artists, and essays detailing specific themes of the collection. The catalogue is being made available in four phases, with the final part due in April 2025.
Which brings us to the love story. The Starr collection was given by Martha Jane Phillips Starr and John “Twink” Starr in the 1960s and ’70s. After their marriage in 1929, the couple assembled an extraordinary collection of works by Smart, including signed and dated examples from nearly every year of the artist’s career. The couple wanted to mark the occasion of their twenty-fifth wedding anniversary with something special: a self-portrait of the artist. He’s known to have created at least nine, a low enough number to consider them scarce, but high enough to demonstrate a degree of ambition and self-promotion rare among his contemporaries. Despite their best efforts, a Smart self-portrait would remain the One That Got Away. That is, until late 2023, when a large (by miniaturist standards—nearly eight inches tall) and especially fine drawing emerged from a private collection. With its acquisition, Starr family descendants were able to help the Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art complete the work of Martha Jane and John Starr—just in time to commemorate their ninety-fifth wedding anniversary.
John Smart: Virtuoso in Miniature • Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art, Kansas City, Missouri • to January 4, 2026 • nelson-atkins.org
