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

Portraits in miniature have possession of an uncertain place in art historical studies. In public galleries they are exhibited in glass cases overlayed by cloth to protect them from daylight, and visitors ofttimes walk straight past them. They are seen as a branch of portraiture, on the other hand a minor one; their dimensions encompass a range from the actually diminutive to a painting too large to deposit in a pocket but small enough to be passed around a dinner table. Their size and the fact that they are ofttimes 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 verify the rule. Historians of jewelry, upon 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 high hilled moreover, are frequently separated and the miniat ure refrained in accordance with a schema that stresse their neighborhood as images on flat surfaces rather than as part of a three-dimensional artifact.

My goals in this essay are, first, to establish the importance of miniatures in European (and particularly in English) cultural history; next to the first to think about ways of reconceptualizing the miniature portrait by means of historically and analytically reassembling the disparate material constituents that make up the whole; and third, to theorize the miniature as a sentimentally invested artifact by the agency of considering it in relation to ideas about relics and to psychoanalytic explanations of play. To take the next to the first of these questions as an indication of the complexity of the field, we may eye that even the terminology used to describe like 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 encompass I therefore opt for "container." Likewise, I shall consign to "portrait-objects," in order to encompass the filled range of small jeweled artifacts that incorporate portrait miniat ures

It is, initially, important to recognize that the vexed question of the miniature is more extensively a point to be solved [i]or[/i] settled 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 greatest in quantity encouraged, and consequently the greatest in quantity followed in England" and that "it is the custom, smooth for men, to present individual another with their pictures," it is not clear what kind of artifact is intended, although 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 novel England perhaps has manifested the greatest fondnes 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 upon the ceramic, the inn sign, or the individual (Figs. 1, 2). (2) Portraiture was, it appear to bes 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 voluptuousness (3) And in luxury of dres and personal apparel, as the German visitor Johann Wilhelm von Archenholz observ toward the extremity of the century, "England surpasse[d] all other nations of Europe" (4) Miniatures, individual aspect of that luxury, were ambulant portraits; to win back some sense of how they functioned socially we must gaze first at how museological interests have affected the visibility and meaning of portrait-objects.

A novel exhibition at the Queen's Gallery, London, (5) proffered all too tangible evidence of the shift in the consumption of miniatures from integrated particular to museological exhibit. The vast majority of the royal miniatures upon display had been refrained through Queen Victoria in uniform gold frames. An aged photograph shows how the miniatures used to be displayed in the queen's audience chamber, behind glass, between the grove paneling and a line of full-scale portraits (Fig. 3) The transformation of miniature from private possession to museum piece began in the seventeenth hundred when the miniature emerged from the "privacy of the private room into the semi-public world of the collector's cabinet." (6) The impact of the public exhibition upon the miniature painter's art after the foundation of the Royal Academy in 1768 has not at any time been thoroughly investigated, but it must have affected one as well as the other the dimensions of miniatures and the way they were execut (7) Miniature painters (among whom were many women) played a significan t if unacknowledged, character in the development of public exhibitions in this period. And exhibiting practices reach forthed into domestic spaces. Testimonies to these practices can be lay the foundation of as, for example, in the nineteenth-century photographs in Lord Ronald Gower's account of Castle Howard (1881) that present to view a set of miniatures attributed to Isaac Oliver in uniform plain gold cases, with nooses as if for a locket on the other hand arranged with a metal schedule bearing the sitter's name at the paw of each image. (8) Arrangements of the like kind as this could narrate dynastic relations and, in boundarys 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