Abigail Smith Adams (Mrs. John Adams)

Gilbert Stuart

National Gallery of Art

Shown from the hips up, a light-skinned woman with deeply flushed cheeks sits in an armchair, looking at us from under raised and pointed eyebrows in this vertical portrait painting. Her body is angled to our right but she turns to look at us with dark eyes lined with a few wrinkles. She has a long, pointed nose, slightly sagging jowls, and her thin, pale pink lips are pressed together in a line. Ringlets of chestnut-brown hair curl onto her forehead from under a frilly white bonnet that frames her face. The bonnet is tied with a wide, white ribbon around the top. The woman’s beet-red gown is cut low but her chest is covered with opaque white fabric that reaches to the frilled collar high on her neck. A sheer white shawl decorated with a pattern of scrolling, stylized leaves and vines drapes across her shoulders. Her right hand, closer to us, rests in her lap. The chair fills the width of the painting, and the woman almost fills the height. The arm of the chair is edged in wood, and the upholstery is patterned with mustard yellow, harvest gold, and tawny brown. The background lightens from dark brown in the upper left corner to tan in the lower right.