Artwork Information

This portrait of Charles Samuel Milward (1772-1819), a miller and corn farmer from Bromley in South-East London, exemplifies the velvety use of strong colours for which John Russell, England’s foremost pastel artist, was renowned. The velvety textures of skin tones and fabrics are achieved by rubbing the colour into the surface with a finger, a technique that Russell called ‘sweetening’. A contrasting sense of fine detail is created by energetic use of a fidgety line, sometimes produced with the point of a sharpened crayon, seen here in the raised surface of Milward’s brass buttons. The sitter commissioned this portrait along with a pendant portrait of his wife Susanna, during his prosperous days shortly after their marriage in 1796.