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"Surrounded with Brilliants": Miniature portraits in Eighteenth-Century England - Bibliography

Art Bulletin, The, March, 2001 by Marcia Pointon

Portraits in miniature occupy an uncertain place in art historical studies. In public galleries they are exhibited in glass cases covered by cloth to protect them from daylight, and visitors often walk straight past them. They are seen as a branch of portraiture, but a minor one; their dimensions encompass a range from the truly diminutive to a painting too large to put in a pocket but small enough to be passed around a dinner table. Their size and the fact that they are often executed in watercolor relegate them to the margins of a genre associated widely with grand public images or psychologically penetrating evocations. The miniatures of Queen Elizabeth I and the work of Nicholas Hilliard are exceptions that prove the rule. Historians of jewelry, on the other hand, view the portrait miniature as incidental; it is the surviving jeweled case or frame that is the focus of their interest. Miniatures and the cases or frames in which they were originally mounted, moreover, are frequently separated and the miniat ures refrained in accordance with a schema that stresses their presence as images on flat surfaces rather than as part of a three-dimensional artifact.

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My goals in this essay are, first, to establish the importance of miniatures in European (and particularly in English) cultural history; second, to think about ways of reconceptualizing the miniature portrait by historically and analytically reassembling the disparate material components that make up the whole; and third, to theorize the miniature as a sentimentally invested artifact by considering it in relation to ideas about relics and to psychoanalytic explanations of play. To take the second of these questions as an indication of the complexity of the field, we may observe that even the terminology used to describe such artifacts suggests uncertainty and slippage: "support," "case," and "frame" indicate a diminution of the semantic efficacy of jeweler's work and a refusal of the interactive relationship between image and surround. I therefore opt for "container." Likewise, I shall refer to "portrait-objects," in order to encompass the full range of small jeweled artifacts that incorporate portrait miniat ures.

It is, initially, important to recognize that the problem of the miniature is more extensively a problem of portraiture in relation to material artifacts more widely defined. When William Hogarth's friend Jean-Andre Rouquet states that "portraiture is the kind of painting the most encouraged, and consequently the most followed in England" and that "it is the custom, even for men, to present one another with their pictures," it is not clear what kind of artifact is intended, though it is generally assumed he is referring to full-scale portraits.1 Henry Angelo is a little more precise, remarking that "of all civilized nations, ancient or modern, England perhaps has manifested the greatest fondness for portraiture, whether the human character was to be depicted with the pencil [that is, paintbrush], the chisel, or the pen." In fact, he might well have added: and displayed on the ceramic, the inn sign, or the person (Figs. 1, 2). (2) Portraiture was, it seems, relatively as much a part of eighteenth-century urban life as it is today; it enabled individuals to re-present themselves and their possessions, ensuring that clothing, jewelry, and personal adornment contributed discursively as well as materially to the organizing governance of eighteenth-century urban elites, as well as to the expression and articulation of luxury. (3) And in luxury of dress and personal apparel, as the German visitor Johann Wilhelm von Archenholz observed toward the end of the century, "England surpasse[d] all other nations of Europe." (4) Miniatures, one aspect of that luxury, were ambulant portraits; to recover some sense of how they functioned socially we must look first at how museological interests have affected the visibility and meaning of portrait-objects.

A recent exhibition at the Queen's Gallery, London, (5) offered all too tangible evidence of the shift in the consumption of miniatures from integrated object to museological exhibit. The vast majority of the royal miniatures on display had been refrained by Queen Victoria in uniform gold frames. An old photograph shows how the miniatures used to be displayed in the queen's audience chamber, behind glass, between the wood paneling and a line of full-scale portraits (Fig. 3). The transformation of miniature from private possession to museum piece began in the seventeenth century when the miniature emerged from the "privacy of the closet into the semi-public world of the collector's cabinet." (6) The impact of the public exhibition on the miniature painter's art after the foundation of the Royal Academy in 1768 has never been thoroughly investigated, but it must have affected both the dimensions of miniatures and the way they were executed. (7) Miniature painters (among whom were many women) played a significan t, if unacknowledged, role in the development of public exhibitions in this period. And exhibiting practices extended into domestic spaces. Testimonies to these practices can be found, as, for example, in the nineteenth-century photographs in Lord Ronald Gower's account of Castle Howard (1881) that show a set of miniatures attributed to Isaac Oliver in uniform plain gold cases, with loops as if for a locket, but arranged with a metal scroll bearing the sitter's name at the foot of each image. (8) Arrangements such as this could narrate dynastic relations and, in terms both of visuality and of function, may be understood as a continuation of the Renaissance and seventeenth-century practice of accumulating medals and creating imagistic family trees.

"Surrounded with Brilliants": Miniature portraits in Eighteenth-Century England - Bibliography

Art Bulletin, The, March, 2001 by Marcia Pointon

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