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

We have now reached a point where it is possible to see how miniatures are historically, quintessentially, about the oscillation between self and other. They stage a linkage between the subject and an other and generate, in eighteenth-century England, a mass of affective imagery narrating contemplative moments, often with erotic implications, in which solitary young men and women gaze at miniatures. The word gaze in this period denotes a fixity of looking or staring that implies a degree of self-consciousness on the part of the looker and the looked at. Miniatures in which the eye and its immediate surround, together with a lock of hair, stand metonymically for the whole face of the looked at are devices within, and further material evidence of, the game of fixed and self-conscious looking. (70) The gaze is, in other words, a socialized manner of seeing. (71) It is also a mode of looking that is associated with the kind of artifact under discussion here, an object that involved the use of convex lenses in its production and that required viewers to focus intently if they were to grasp its import. Thus, in The Sylph, Julia Grenville's father recounts how, when he was courting her mother and was about to be sent abroad with his regiment, she gave him "her picture in a locket, and on the reverse a device with her hair; this was an inestimable present to me--It was my sole employ, while off duty, to gaze on the lovely resemblance of the fairest of women." (72) To possess, and to contemplate, an image of the loved one here signals a private sensibility that complements the masculine ideal of "duty." Portrait-objects as gazed at by women in representations in the second half of the eighteenth century (Figs. 26, 27) are interchangeable with mirrors and letters, playing on the idea of love as a recognition of the subject's ego in the other. The implied distance between the individual who gazes and the held object gazed at is essential to the maintenance of this narrative. In Lacanian terms the miniature--hand-held and ga zed at-stages the compelling oscillation between affirmative self-recognition and the frustration of the disunified body.

Portrait-objects are distinguished not only by the requirement that they be gazed at but also by the necessity that they be held. We need to ask therefore how touch is registered, either materially with regard to the object or graphically within representational practice. With regard to the former, we might cite the small enamel and gold "portrait box" made by an anonymous goldsmith in London probably in the 1750s and comprising four miniature portraits by Christian Friedrich Zincke of members of the "bluestocking" circle around Mrs. Elizabeth Montagu and the duchess of Portland (Fig. 28)--perhaps one of the outcomes of the portrait sitting referred to earlier. On the cover we see Mrs. Mary Delany in a russet dress over a white slip held with a string of pearls; on the interior cover the duchess of Portland in a blue dress trimmed with fur and wearing pearls; on the hinged base Mrs. Elizabeth Montagu in black Tudor costume; and on the interior base an unknown female sitter in a white dress with a garland of f lowers. (73) The box itself has no obvious practical function, while the portraits it supports, as a consequence of being incorporated into an oval box structure, are rendered peculiarly interdependent. Only by manipulating the box, turning it over in one's hands, opening it and closing it do the varied combinations of relationships between the images reveal themselves, staging through analogue the close ties of friendship, its intimacies, secrecies, revelations, and proximities, physical and emotional. The importance of tactility and of body-object proximity is inflected, moreover, in the self-conscious design of such boxes--a matter of fashion and of comfort. Writing in 1754 from Paris, the major center for these exquisitely made small artifacts, Lord Charlemont's agent was accordingly concerned with the relation between object-design and the body: "I found in many of the best shops many new oval boxes. They told me the public was now divided between them and the square ones, which are certainly more troubl esome in the pocket." (74)