Portrait of Selina (Quin) Markham

Elizabeth Murray · 1850

Medium

Black chalk with colored fabricated chalk, and traces of white gouache, on gray wove paper

Original size

25.4 × 17.6 cm (10 × 6 15/16 in.)

Currently held

Art Institute of Chicago

Movement

Romanticism

Portrait of Selina (Quin) Markham carries the quiet intimacy of a sitting between two women who trusted each other — the subject's gaze relaxed, the handling assured. Elizabeth Murray was a British artist who built a reputation in the mid-nineteenth century largely outside the conventional routes available to women of her time, exhibiting at the Royal Academy and spending formative years in Morocco and Gibraltar, where she developed a sensitivity to light and human presence that marked her portraiture. This work — drawn in black and colored chalk with traces of white gouache on gray wove paper — demonstrates her fluency in the softer tonal registers of draughtsmanship, where character is built through restraint rather than paint. The gray ground does much of the atmospheric work, with chalk lifted and layered to suggest form without forcing it. Murray was one of the few women of her era to sustain a professional exhibiting career across decades, a fact the Art Institute of Chicago acknowledges in holding her work among its permanent collection. The hand-painted oil reproduction translates Murray's delicate chalk modelling into a medium with greater permanence and presence, preserving the contemplative mood of the original while giving the composition the weight and warmth of oil on canvas.