HANNAH DART

For more than three decades, Jeremiah Theus was the Charleston’s leading painter. Little is known of Theus's training; he immigrated to South Carolina with his Swiss Protestant family in 1736 and by 1740 advertised himself, as did many other colonial painters, as one who would paint portraits, landscapes, and crests and coats of arms. More than 150 of his paintings survive, and his portrait of Hannah Dart (1753–1827) demonstrates why he was so popular with Charlestonians. With careful attention to the satins and lace of her dress, the delicate handling of the flower in her hand and in her hair decoration, and the appropriate rendering of her expression and comportment, Dart's portrait presents her as a refined and genteel young girl, probably between ten and fourteen years of age. Like other colonial painters, many of Theus’s portraits follow a series of conventions regarding pose and dress, but it is in his portraits of children, such as this one, where his liveliest compositions are encountered.