SEEN one, seen them all, is an understandable response to portrait miniatures. But Compton Verney has brought the diminutive form to life by recreating how the pieces would have been worn.
Beginning with a newly identified portrait of Mary I (c.1544-50), previously thought to be Catherine Parr, the oval miniature may have been painted when Edward VI became King, before Mary’s own reign. It is attributed Lucas Hollenbout, who came from an established family of Netherlands illuminators, appointed King’s Painter to Henry VIII in 1534, but overshadowed by his pupil Hans Holbein. The sitter’s jewellery, listed in Mary’s inventory as “oon Little Crosse w iiij great Diamondes and iij great perles”, is identical to that worn by Mary in a Hollenbout work of 1525, the first portrait miniature created in England.
Realism is a distinctive element of portrait miniatures. They were created from sittings in the presence of the subject, not from pattern or other sources, and the expressive likenesses contrast with the elongated limbs and stylised, pale oval faces of larger Tudor and Stuart portraits. Gold and silver were used to represent jewels as if they were miniature versions of the real thing. Calligraphy, incorporated into the image or on the reverse, recorded the date of the sitting and age of the subject, capturing a moment of time.
Miniatures were painted on vellum. Nicholas Hilliard, the first English-born artist to achieve international renown, favoured the skin of unborn calves. The vellum was attached to a playing card with starch paste, then smoothed with a dog’s tooth. A squirrel-hair brush was used for painting, and details in ground gold and silver were burnished with a stoat or ferret’s tiny tooth.
Hilliard, who had spent his childhood in Geneva to escape the Marian persecution, captured the romantic and chivalric notions that defined Elizabethan culture. His celebrated pair of portraits of Elizabeth I and Robert Dudley (c.1525) are displayed side by side on the palm of a wooden hand. Probably commissioned by Dudley when he entertained hopes of becoming Elizabeth’s husband, the two figures face the same way, suggesting that they would been housed together in a locket, the faces touching when the case closed.
Hilliard’s pupil, and later rival, Isaac Oliver arrived in England as a three-year-old, his Huguenot parents having fled France’s Wars of Religion.
Miniatures’ intimate quality is emphasised by Oliver’s Unidentified Gentleman (1600), displayed, in its original gold and enamel frame, dangling by a velvet ribbon from a model hand. Men wore miniatures openly, as tokens of love or friendship. Women could use a long cord to conceal a portrait under the neckline, keeping the image close.
A late-16th-century lace collar with zigzag points gives an idea of the intricate craftwork involved in the white collar worn by Oliver’s sitter, contrasting with the sky-blue background. Portrait miniatures both captured the fashions of the time and were part of them.
Samuel Cooper’s nearly 50-year career as a portraitist is celebrated for eliciting Cromwell’s instruction to paint him, “pimples, warts and everything as you see me”. The related sketch, thought to be the source of Cromwell’s directive, is reproduced next to the Lord Protector’s gold-oval-framed miniature portrait. The two images show the influence of Anthony Van Dyck, court painter to Charles I, with light highlighting the left side of Cromwell’s slightly turned face, then drawing the eye down and across to the gleaming right- hand plane of his breastplate. Cooper captures the iconography of a Puritan warrior, complete with white flat collar. During the Civil War, Cooper painted both royalists and parliamentarians. In 1660, Charles II visited the artist’s studio within two weeks of his arrival in London.
For the Georgians, miniatures played an important part in courtship and marriage negotiations. They also offered a more informal image than oil portraits, where sitters would be in court robes or elaborate costume. An enamel-on-copper portrait from 1794 by John Russell shows Gerard de Visme with a cloud of powder from his wig on his shoulders and collar. The white powder contrasts with the red velvet jacket.
The years 1720-1840 marked the high-water mark of miniatures, as a growing middle class wanted images of loved ones. The art of limning was reinvigorated by the new technique of painting watercolour on ivory. Thomas Hargreaves’s rectangular portrait A Vicar (1827) shows the luminosity of this technique, with a peach-hued face framed with snowy white hair and preaching bands. Four 1790s portraits by Andrew Plimer of four different male sitters, one of whom may be the 5th Duke of Rutland, have identical cloudy-sky backgrounds. Displayed in a semi-circle, the subjects look so similar in black jackets and pig-tailed wigs that they resemble a boy band.
Queen Victoria popularised miniatures as objects of mourning, which could be held or worn close to the body in remembrance. But, by the end of the 19th century, photography had become the most popular form of capturing the likeness of self and others.
“The Reflected Self: Portrait Miniatures, 1540-1850” runs at Compton Verney Compton Art Gallery and Park, Warwickshire, until 23 February. Phone 01926 645 500. www.comptonverney.org.uk
