Sarah Goodridge (American, 1788–1853) — Beauty Revealed, 1828. Watercolor on ivory, 2.6 × 3.1 in (6.7 × 8 cm). Metropolitan Museum of Art.
The most famous boobs in American art history — and they were a love letter.
Sarah Goodridge was one of the most successful miniature portrait painters in America. She painted senators, generals, judges — and, in 1828, she painted this: her own bared chest, encircled by white cloth, on a 2.6-inch ivory plate. Then she gave it to the recipient of her affections, the great statesman Daniel Webster, in a tiny red box. This was 1828. There was no Instagram. The original ‘sent this to my crush’ was a watercolor on ivory.
Historians have debated exactly who received it, but the consensus lands on Webster — a married man, by the way, which makes this the 19th century equivalent of a very bold DM. The public domain review called it ‘pale breasts encircled by a swirl of cloth, painted on a thin plate of ivory’ — and the fact that they belonged to the woman who painted them is what makes it radical. She wasn’t painted by a man; she painted herself, for her own purposes, on her own terms, and handed the result directly to the man she wanted.
It’s small — smaller than a playing card — which makes it intimate. You have to hold it close to see it. That’s the whole point. This is not public art; this is private art that happened to survive, and it survived because it’s brilliant: the swirl of cloth, the soft modeling of the ivory, the sheer audacity.
When Goodridge died in 1853, the miniature ended up in the Met, where it now lives behind glass — and every tourist who sees it is staring at a love letter that was never meant for them. Two centuries later, it’s still doing exactly what it was made to do: making people lean in for a closer look.
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