WD4528

Three-quarter length portrait of a Christian ayah carrying the child Marianne Reeves.

Pencil and watercolour; 155 by 116 mm.

Signed lower right: ‘EN’; and inscribed on label pasted to reverse of original frame: ‘A portrait of my sister Marianne Mrs. James & 2ly Mrs. Knapp when a child in the arms of her nurse’ [indecipherable] ‘Mangalore. Painted by Nash in India. The year not known precisely but probably 1805 or 1806 as my sister was born in May 1805. The woman’s head is well done, the style Edridge’s. Her forehead tattoo’d with the Cross. Fred. I. J. Reeves, Spencer House, East Sheen. 1875.’

Note: Marianne Jane Reeves was born in 1805, the fourth daughter of Frederick Reeves, Bombay Civil Service and his wife Catherine, while her father was Military Paymaster in Kanara. She married the Rev. John Thomas James, Vicar of Flitton-with-Silsoe, Bedfordshire, in November 1823. James was appointed Bishop of Calcutta in 1827, but died August 1828 at sea. For her drawings of Calcutta and the Bishop’s Palace, see WD4251-4267.