Beauty Revealed - Sarah Goodridge Art Print / Canvas

Sarah Goodridge painted Beauty Revealed in 1828 on a sliver of ivory no wider than a calling card, and sent it as a private love token to the widowed senator Daniel Webster. Two warm-cream breasts emerge between parted folds of muslin, their pink-brown nipples set against the cool pearl gray of cloth and a near-charcoal Boston studio backdrop. The watercolor stippling is impossibly fine, each pore built from a thousand hair-strokes that would feel velvet under a magnifying loupe. Federal-era American miniature painting rarely dared a bared female torso, yet Goodridge — a self-taught Massachusetts portraitist who supported her sister and mother through her brush — turned the convention of the lover's eye into an act of erotic candor and self-possession.