Lady in a Black Dress and a White Bonnet with Blue Ribbons

Against a monochrome grey background, Aldenrath portrayed a middle-aged lady in a black dress with a white modesty panel and a white lace bonnet decorated and tied with blue ribbons. The artist’s prosaic approach to his subject, including the truthful rendering of the fullness of her face, are offset by the warmth of the delicately painted skin tones. Using delicate pointillism, Aldenrath rendered the colour transitions between the different areas of her face in a soft, flowing manner and precisely modelled her dark blue-grey eyes and pale lashes.

The sitter, who has not been identified to date, is possibly Albertine Friederike Amalie von Schiller (1796–1869), daughter of the Prussian civil servant Ludwig Friedrich Pappritz and Johanna Sophie Bloch, and wife of the solicitor Heinrich Wilhelm Theodor von Schiller. Together with the artist Friedrich Carl Gröger, his friend and colleague, Aldenrath made a lithograph of the latter woman in which she resembles the subject of the above miniature.¹

J. S. O.