Sarah Biffin, Georgian miniaturist and disability pioneer

I do not regret my situation, I thank God that he has been pleased to make me as I am, nor do I envy the enjoyment of others.” It is 1810. The writer is 26 years old. She has been acclaimed as a “Great Genius”, the world’s “Eighth Wonder”. Handbills trumpet her “comely appearance”. A painter of miniatures, she has exhibited her work on New Bond Street. Even the king, George III, has seen and admired her painting. 

He knows, as do all those who marvel at her talent, that Sarah Biffin was born without arms and legs. She is 37in tall and paints with her mouth and shoulder, with a brush sewn into the puffed sleeve of her dress. Sometimes she signs her portraits “painted by Miss Biffin Without Hands”. 

Biffin, forgotten since her death in 1850, is enjoying a revival. In December 2019, a watercolour self-portrait of the artist at her easel sold for £110,000 at Sotheby’s, far exceeding its estimate. Next month, an exhibition, Without Hands: The Art of Sarah Biffin, opens at Philip Mould & Company, with prices ranging from £10,000 to £100,000. It is long overdue. Like contemporary artists such as Yinka Shonibare and Ryan Gander, both wheelchair users, Biffin conquered life-changing physical disability to excel; in a society in which, for disabled women, autonomy was virtually non-existent, she achieved financial independence through much of her life. Artist Alison Lapper, adviser to the exhibition and herself born with phocomelia, the same condition as Biffin, celebrates her as a “formidable artist and a formidable character… a strong, stubborn, single-minded human being”. From the sequence of self-portraits in Mould’s exhibition emerges Biffin’s pugnacious good cheer. Evident, too, is a certain challenge in her very direct gaze. 

She signs her work “painted by Sarah Biffin without hands”

Biffin, born in 1784, came from a working-class farming family in Somerset. Her upbringing was surprisingly loving – grounds, suggests Lapper, who spent her own childhood in care, for her eventual strength of character. Contemporary accounts indicate that she was brought up “with much care and tenderness under the immediate eye of an affectionate mother”, and spoken of in terms that ignored her disability – as “a dear little girl, with fair curls, blue eyes and a sweet disposition”.

But there were limits. Her childhood included proscriptions based on her parents’ view of her limitations; Sarah repeatedly ignored these parental strictures. At the age of eight, she asked to be taught how to sew with her mouth. Her parents’ refusal did not, she wrote, intimidate her. “Whenever my mother and father were absent, I was continually practising every invention, till at length I could, with my mouth, thread a needle – tie a knot… – cut out and make my own dresses.” The woman who emerges from Biffin’s letters and self-portraits, Lapper explains, was, from the outset, “determined to live her own life”.

And live it she did. A man called Emmanuel Dukes had persuaded her parents that “a comfortable living might be obtained by Public Exhibition”; Sarah herself was eager for broader horizons than East Quantoxhead. For 15 years, beginning in 1804, Dukes and Biffin toured English and Scottish fairs. Modern sensibilities might recoil at a development that saw Biffin presented as a circus turn for gawpers, signing her name for spectators who marvelled at her unexpected dexterity – but Biffin herself took a different view. It was her own decision to practise and practise, hiring rooms from Edinburgh to Bristol, with the assistance of Dukes, in which she exhibited her portrait miniatures and accepted new commissions. 

It was at one of the fairs that she encountered George Douglas, 16th Earl of Morton, a benign svengali with a very useful address book. Biffin left Dukes and the wooden booths of the fairground around 1819, and until her death she would earn her living as a professional miniaturist, bolstering her income by teaching. Morton’s contacts nudged her towards the Royal Family, including George IV who, in 1830, bought a miniature for 25 guineas, the highest sum Biffin would ever earn. Later, William IV gave Biffin a pension of £12 a year. 

Philip Mould applauds Biffin’s entrepreneurialism as well as her talent, describing her as “a distinguished professional miniaturist, as well a highly adept painter of small-scale still life”. He highlights “her compositions of exotic feathers, which allowed her to demonstrate the full range of her technical mastery”, and attributes renewed interest in her work to her sex rather than her phocomelia. Lapper adds that “she seemed to transcend her disability and almost convince people that this wasn’t what it was all about.” But she cautions that the current focus on Biffin is not proof of significantly increased inclusivity within today’s art world: “I’m still struggling now to break through the same barriers Biffin faced.”

Even without phocomelia, Biffin would have struggled to achieve long-term financial independence given her background and sex. Eventually her luck ran out: the emergence of photography destroyed the market for miniatures. Still, friends and admirers supported her and her spirit was uncowed. Months before she died, she exhibited for the last time at the Royal Academy.