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was Miss Biffin, whose portrait I am able to show you, engraved 
by Sievier, after her own painting. Born at East Quantoxhead 
in 1784, it seems to me extremely probable that before going to 
London to be taught by a Mr. Dukes, she tried her hand at Bath. 
I say “tried her hand,” but that is purely a fagon de parler, for 
as the portrait shows, she was born with neither hands, arms, nor 
legs, and is said to have painted with her mouth; though this 
seems to be contradicted by the print I have, which shows a 
brush fixed to the stump of her right arm. She seems to have 
attained some proficiency as a miniaturist, being carried about the 
country for some years, and charging three guineas for a portrait. 
If I could definitely include her as a Bath artist I could furnish 
many more particulars of her which I at present omit. 
The two Plimers, Nathaniel and Andrew, were also born in 
Somersetshire, and it is not at all unlikely that their first portraits 
were painted here. Little is known of their lives, but the work 
of the younger brother, Andrew, is most excellent, in fact second 
only to that of the prince of miniature artists on ivory, Richard 
Conway, and his works are very eagerly sought after by collectors 
now-a-days. In his time he painted many celebrities, in fact 
rank, beauty and fashion alike delighted in posing as subjects for 
his pencil, and among others who sat to him was the famed 
_ beauty, Georgiana, Duchess of Devonshire, whose handsome face 
has also been handed down to posterity by Reynolds and 
_ Gainsborough. Some of my hearers may be able to tell me if 
she was in Bath in 1785, the date of one miniature of her by 
Plimer, the year before he exhibited at the Royal Academy for 
the first time. The unhappy Mrs. Fitzherbert he painted in the 
same year, and the famous miniature of three ladies of the 
-Rushout family, which was one of the attractions of the ‘Fair 
Women” exhibition, at the Grafton Galleries, was from his brush, 
__ Miss Catherine Andras, who was not a miniature painter, but 
a practitioner of the sister art of portrait modelling in wax, was 
born in 1775 in this locality, and worked for some time either in 
