Sarah Haden

A young woman is shown in left profile, gazing slightly upwards. Sketching rapidly from life, Wright delineates her features with light black chalk on a warm, tea-coloured ground, which he has chosen for its tonal contrast to the sitter’s ‘peaches-and-cream’ complexion. She wears a tall lace bonnet, beneath which her soft brown hair, loosely tied back, falls in tresses down to her shoulder. With its high domed form and crest of feathers, her bonnet recalls an Indian princely turban, an example of orientalising headwear that was adopted by fashionable Englishwomen from the 1770s. Wright heightens the effect of light falling across her face and neck by surrounding her head with a dark cloud of roughly stroked-in black chalk and wash and he adds velvety depth to her hair with smudged brown pastels.

Wright made many drawings on coloured paper supports, using chalk and pastel to achieve different effects of light, tone and texture. These fresh portrait studies did not necessarily relate to painted compositions and were not produced for sale. Rather, they are thought to have been made of friends of family and later given to their sitters. The sitter in this example is Sarah Haden (1760–1820), daughter of George and Rebecca Wallis, who were prosperous innkeepers, related to the artist through marriage, whose inn and family home were across the road from ‘St Helen’s House’, the property that Wright rented from 1779 to 1793.

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