Portrait of Mary Wollstonecraft (1759–1797)

Narrator: Portrait of Mary Wollstonecraft by John Keenan. 1804. After a circa 1797 portrait by John Opie. Oil on canvas. Approximately 30 inches high by 25 inches wide.

The portrait shows a white woman from the bust upwards, set against a dark neutral background. She is shown in three-quarter profile, her brown eyes looking towards her right—that is, our left as we face the portrait. She has wavy mid-brown hair, parted in the center and with bangs falling over her temples and ears. A soft, brimless black hat is set on the back of her head, covering the rest of her hair. She has an oval face with a touch of pink on her cheeks.

She wears a white Empire line dress, a style with a bodice that ends just below the bust. It has long sleeves and a shawl-like neckline that crosses over the bust in soft, draped folds.

Interpretive commentary follows.

Anna Deavere Smith: Meet English writer Mary Wollstonecraft. A feminist long before the term was invented, she argued passionately for equality between the sexes in her 1792 book, A Vindication of the Rights of Woman.

In the wake of the French Revolution, at a time when sweeping social change seemed attainable, Wollstonecraft called on women to challenge rigidly defined and oppressive gender roles. 

Here, in a plain white dress, Wollstonecraft is a shining light against a darkened background. This posthumous portrait testifies to her early influence in the United States. It was commissioned in 1803 by Vice President Aaron Burr for his daughter Theodosia, whom he raised on Wollstonecraft’s egalitarian principles. 

Though it’s a faithful copy of an earlier portrait, the painter added one detail: the black lace at the subject’s right elbow, a subtle sign that the painting was made after her death.

It’s difficult to tell here, but when the original was painted in 1797, Wollstonecraft was pregnant. Sadly, she died just ten days after childbirth. But her baby, the future Mary Shelley, inherited her mother’s genius and grew up to write her own groundbreaking book: Frankenstein.

Mary Wollstonecraft was just 38 when she died, but through her writings she left a powerful legacy. More than a century later, writer Virginia Woolf said of her: “she is alive and active, she argues and experiments, we hear her voice and trace her influence even now among the living.”