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| Gottlieb Schick Portrait of Heinrike Dannecker 1802 oil on canvas Alte Nationalgalerie, Berlin |
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| Jean-Bernard Duvivier Portrait of Madame Tallien 1806 oil on canvas Brooklyn Museum |
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| Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres Portrait of Madame Duvaucey 1807 oil on canvas Musée Condé, Chantilly |
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| Thomas Lawrence Portrait of Caroline Matilda Sotheron ca. 1808 oil on canvas Art Gallery of South Australia, Adelaide |
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| Christoffer Wilhelm Eckersberg Portrait of the model Maddalena (or Anna Maria) Uhden 1815 oil on canvas Hirschsprung Collection, Copenhagen |
"Sophie did not possess many books. She had her hymnal, her Evangelium, and a list, bound with ribbon, of all the dogs that her family had ever had, although some of them had died so long ago that she could not remember them."
"There was not even a passable likeness of Sophie in the house, except for a wretched miniature, in which her eyes appeared to bulge like gooseberries, or like Fichte's. Only the hair, falling defiantly over her white muslin dress, was worth looking at. The miniature caused the whole family, Sophie above all, to laugh immoderately."
– Penelope Fitzgerald, from The Blue Flower (New York: Houghton Mifflin, 1995)
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| Ferdinand Georg Waldmüller Portrait of the mother of Captain von Stierle Holzmeister 1819 oil on canvas Alte Nationalgalerie, Berlin |
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| Jean-François Millet Portrait of Louise Antoinette Feuardent 1841 oil on canvas Getty Museum, Los Angeles |
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| Edgar Degas Portrait of Victoria Dubourg 1868-69 oil on canvas Toledo Museum of Art, Ohio |
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| Edward Harrison May Portrait of Edith Wharton in childhood ca. 1870 oil on canvas National Portrait Gallery, Washington DC |
"Yes," said the girl, absentmindedly holding one of her grandmother's hands in her own, examining the thin skin stretched over the pulsing blue veins. "Where do you want to begin?" she asked, turning the limp hand over and looking at the mass of lines on the palm.
"As a young girl," said the old woman rather smugly, "with your red hair and your face, only it was mine then."
"Were you young for a long time?" asked the girl.
"Yes," said her grandmother, "for a very long time." And as she spoke the solemn procession of her childhood walked through the room. There were people she knew and people who were strangers but whose faces had lodged themselves in her mind. There were also animals, birds, and even fish which had impressed her in some way or another. Noises and smells drifted through her head while the darkness of the night and the brightness of the day repeated itself over and over again as the years slipped from one into the next.
She watched them all marching past her bed and when something in particular caught hold of her attention she made it pause so that she could look at it more closely.
– Julia Blackburn, from The Leper's Companions (New York: Pantheon Books, 1999)
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| James Tissot Portrait of Mrs. Catherine Smith Gill and two of her children 1877 oil on canvas Walker Art Gallery, Liverpool |
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| Henri Fantin-Latour Portrait of Madame Léon Maître 1882 oil on canvas Brooklyn Museum |
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| John Singer Sargent Portrait of Mrs. Cecil Wade 1886 oil on canvas Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art, Kansas City |
"I had asked her if she happened to know, as we couldn't see, who was next Mrs. Server, and, though unable to say at the moment, she made no scruple, after a short interval, of ascertaining with the last directness. The stretch forward in which she had indulged, or the information she had caused to be passed up to her while I was again engaged on my right, established that it was Lord Lutley who had brought the lovely lady in and that it was Mr. Long who was on her other side. These things indeed were not the finest point of my companion's communication, for I saw that what she felt I would be really interested in was the fact that Mr. Long had brought in Lady John, who was naturally, therefore, his other neighbour. Beyond Lady John was Mr. Obert, and beyond Mr. Obert Mrs. Froome, not, for a wonder, this time paired, as by the immemorial tradition, so fairly comical in its candour, with Lord Lutley. Wasn't it too funny, the kind of grandmotherly view of their relation shown in their always being put together? If I perhaps questioned whether "grandmotherly" were exactly the name for the view, what yet at least was definite in the light of this evening's arrangement was that there did occur occasions on which they were apart. My friend of course disposed of this observation by the usual exception that "proved the rule"; but it was absurd how I had thrilled with her announcement, and our exchange of ideas meanwhile helped to carry me on."
– Henry James, from The Sacred Fount (1901)
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| Sir William Blake Richmond Portrait of Mrs. Ernest Moon 1888 oil on canvas Tate Britain |
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| Egon Schiele Portrait of the artist's wife, seated, holding her right ankle 1917 gouache Morgan Library, New York |