One Fine Show: ‘A Very Strong Likeness of Her’ at the Milwaukee Art Museum

The Metropolitan Museum of Art’s show on Van Gogh’s paintings of cypresses was, for me, a huge success because it made me feel insane. The show takes you through his early efforts to draw the beguiling trees and catalogs his obsession with them in his letters to his brother.

We see them in the backgrounds of happier works like shadows, but they’re something he’s putting off. They’re out of focus. Then it’s failure after failure. We’re taken through his falling out with Gauguin, and his commitment to the hospital in Arles—at which point we’re as eager to see them depicted as he is. When he finally pulls it off, it’s elating, but by then, you’re so down his rabbit hole that his whorls might as well have been painted around your head.

A new show at the Milwaukee Art Museum, “A Very Strong Likeness of Her,” benefits from a similarly singular focus. Its subject is just one painting: Miss Frances Lee by Francis Cotes (1769), with the rest of the exhibit dedicated to ephemera and literature unpacking its significance.

The portrait of the 11-year-old was commissioned by her uncle Joseph—her closest family while she attended boarding school in England—for the benefit of her father Robert in Jamaica. Portraits were, of course, the selfies of the era, and Cotes was an in-demand member of the Royal Academy, having been commissioned by Queen Charlotte to paint her infant daughter Charlotte, the Princess Royal, two years prior in 1767. He died at 44, a year after completing his portrait of Fanny Lee, “after drinking a potion that he had believed would cure him of an illness.”

And what a portrait it is. So often in this era, children look strange because they’re portrayed as small adults, but if her pose and dress are mature, she still clearly reads as young. The eyes are wistful but strong, and she plays with a rabbit fashioned out of a napkin. She’s adaptable and wears her clothes well. These were possibly done by Peter Toms, a specialist drapery painter who also worked with Joshua Reynolds.

But the degree of her adaptability is truly revealed by the rest of the exhibition, because Fanny Lee’s mother, Priscilla Kelly, was a free woman of color. When Robert secured his fortune in sugar, he would return with Kelly from Jamaica and marry her in London. This is where the rest of the exhibition comes in. The average Briton used about 20 pounds of cane sugar per year by 1800, despite it having been fairly exotic before the empire started to cultivate it in the colonies.

Fanny’s portrait is surrounded by all kinds of bespoke British instruments dedicated to this new cult of sugar. Sugar bowls, sugar boxes, sugar casters, sugar tongs, sugar scissors to cut sugar lumps off sugar loaves. Like the painting, it’s all gorgeous but more than a little ominous. Sugar isn’t good for anyone.

Robert Lee obtained a special petition so that his “quadroon” wife and their children could inherit his estate, which means their story ultimately had a happy ending. This show says much about its era and our own.

“A Very Strong Likeness of Her” is on view at the Milwaukee Art Museum through October 22.