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Original gold frame (Colonial), the reverse with panel glazed to reveal hair.
This portrait is an unusual addition to Smart’s early years in Madras, where he had arrived with his nineteen-year-old daughter Anna Maria in 1785. Anna Maria appears to have been the eldest surviving child of John and his first wife Mary Anne, from whom she acquired her Christian name. Her parent’s marriage did not survive her mother’s affair with the artist William Pars in 1775 and in fact her mother died while with Pars in Rome, probably the following year.

In 1784, Smart was granted permission to leave England for India and arrived, with Anna Maria, in September 1785. Smart drew and painted his daughter several times during their early years in India, including a sketch which is now housed in the Cleveland Museum of Art and a miniature dated two years later than the present portrait to 1789 . All extant portraits of Anna Maria show her with dark, curled hair, dark eyes and flushed cheeks, her mouth with a distinctive ‘cupid’s bow’ and slightly protruding lower lip.

This portrait clearly deviates, as do the other portrayals of his daughter, from the more formal commissioned works painted during his early years in Madras. Most European women painted by Smart during these years don the formal powdered wigs of polite British society and wear the latest fashions, their silk gowns adorned with lace. Here, a simple green dress is worn by the sitter, the draped, white veil similar to the type worn by native Indian women. As Anna Maria was now the wife of an officer in the Madras Civil Service, it is possible that this was the practical and respectful daily garb of a woman moving around an Indian city.