Miss Cunningham Holding Her King Charles Spaniel

Robert Healy · 1770

Medium

Black chalk, charcoal, and gouache, with stumping, scratching, and erasing, heightened with white chalk, on ivory laid paper, laid down

Original size

58.4 × 42.2 cm (23 × 16 5/8 in.)

Currently held

Art Institute of Chicago

Movement

Rococo

This intimate portrait of Miss Cunningham and her King Charles Spaniel captures the ease and quiet confidence of eighteenth-century Irish gentry with remarkable tenderness. Robert Healy was one of Ireland's most gifted draughtsmen, active in Dublin in the 1760s and early 1770s before his untimely death around 1771 at approximately twenty-eight years of age. He worked in a demanding multi-layered technique — building form through black chalk and charcoal, then refining surfaces with stumping and selective erasure before applying gouache and white chalk highlights on warm ivory paper. The result sits somewhere between drawing and painting, with a softness and luminosity rarely achieved in works on paper from this period. His portraits of the Anglo-Irish ascendancy at leisure remain among the most vivid records of that world. Healy produced relatively few works in his short career, which makes each surviving piece a studied rarity rather than a product of prolific output. Our hand-painted oil reproduction translates Healy's tonal subtlety and compositional intimacy onto canvas, preserving the gentle interplay of light across the sitter's dress and the warm regard she shows her spaniel — qualities that have kept this work compelling for more than two and a half centuries.