Sledge, Susanna (McKechnie Section 2)

This artist may have been the son of the Mrs Sledge with whom the profilist William Wellings was associated. See the entry on Wellings in this Section for an account of the relations between Wellings and the Sledge family.

A full-length silhouette painted in Wellings's style, though inferior to Wellings's own authenticated work, has been seen by Mr P. G. Higgs. It bore the trade label of S. Sledge in Henrietta Street, Covent Garden, the street in which Wellings is known to have lived 1792-94. (He was the ratepayer for 26 Henrietta Street.)

Foskett has an entry on an eighteenth-century artist named S. Sledge, in which she mentions that she has seen a miniature profile by him, painted on paper, of a man in seventeenth-century fancy dress, shown against a dark shaded background. This profile bore the same trade label, which is worded as follows:

MINIATURE PROFILES

Accurately taken

By

S. SLEDGE

Henrietta Street,

Covent Garden.

Both the silhouette and the portrait miniature were almost certainly painted by the same S. Sledge. Other silhouettes by Sledge, should they be discovered, are likely to show sitters wearing the costume of the 1790s; most of Wellings's own undoubted silhouettes painted on paper or card date from the 1780s; prints of some of them were published during the 1790s.