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This posthumous portrait of Sophia Dighton was most likely based on a drawing by the artist’s (and sitter’s) father, John Smart (1741-1811).[1] The miniature was painted by Sophia’s half-brother, the only child of John Smart to follow him a professional artist.

John Smart junior was the illegitimate son of John Smart and Sarah Midgeley.[2] When his father John left for India in 1785, the boy, then aged eight years old, was presumably left in the care of his mother (but under the guardianship of Thomas Parkinson and Philip Paumier). By 1788 Smart must have felt that this arrangement was unsatisfactory as he executed a Deed-Poll at Fort St. George appointing the artist Robert Bowyer and Edmund Monk to supervise the education of the children.

On his return to England in 1795, Smart appears to have taken his son, now aged nineteen, as an apprentice. John Smart junior’s technique is so close to that of his father that it seems inconceivable he would have learnt elsewhere. Given the transportability of miniatures and drawings, it is possible that John Smart junior may have been sent works by his father to copy prior to his father’s arrival back in England from India.

Painted in 1797, this portrait of Sophia, who had died five years earlier, must have been a poignant reminder of the vivacious daughter who died in childbirth only shortly after joining her father in India and only a few years into her marriage. Sophia’s son, also called John (b.1793), was brought up by her sister Anna-Maria and this miniature of his mother may have been painted for him as he approached his fifth birthday. As Sophia’s widowed husband, John Dighton, remarried in 1795 it is unlikely to have been in his possession.

[1]According to D. Foskett, this drawing was in the collection of Peter Jaffé, Esq. and dated to her arrival in India late in December 1788 (John Smart; the Man and his Miniatures, 1964, p. ix ref. plate IV, fig. 12
[2]He also had a sister, Sarah.