Portrait Miniatures Research Articles

The Dead Bride

The Dead Bride Robin Jaffee Frank (bio) Figures Click for larger view View full resolution Figure 1. P. R. Vallée (France; active U.S. 1803–1815), Harriet Mackie (The Dead Bride) (1788–1804), probably 1804, watercolor on ivory; verso, plaited hair, 2H x 2 in. (6.4 x 5.1 cm) oval, Signed l.l. in graphite: Vallée, Mabel Brady Garvan Collection, Yale University Art Gallery, 1936.300. Portrait miniatures are among the most personal forms of artistic expression, and few offer deeper insight into American private life than Vallée’s The Dead Bride (figure 1). It conveys, in a different way than texts, how much our understanding of death and our relationship to those who have died has changed over time. Painted in watercolor on ivory and housed in a rose-gold locket, this portrait would have been worn close to the heart and looked at in private, as one would approach a secret. Through the commissioning of this token small enough to hold in the palm of one’s hand, someone in Charleston, South Carolina in 1804 acquired a visible past —a tangible link with a teenaged girl both loved and mourned. By reconstructing as far as possible the history of her life and death, we restore to this miniature its power to suggest the intimate communion between the self and another. 1 The miniaturist’s name has traditionally been given as Jean François de Vallée, supposedly a textile manufacturer who corresponded with Thomas Jefferson, but no documentary evidence supports this. However, advertisements in the local press reveal that between 1803 and 1806 one P.R. Vallée did work in Charleston, and his technical virtuosity reveals him to have been a mature miniaturist when he arrived there. 2 He announced in the Times: “Mr. P. Vallée, Miniature Painter, LATELY arrived from Paris, offers his services to the Ladies and Gentlemen of this City, in the line of his profession; he warrants the most correct LIKENESS.” 3 Vallée’s likeness of Harriet Mackie was taken from her corpse, dressed in a white empire bridal gown, with a veil and garland of white roses crowning her head. Painting the dead cannot be easy. Vallée might have secured Harriet’s slack jaw with a strap and continued to work as decomposition set in. It was rare for a miniaturist to depict the dead with closed eyes, as Vallée did. Usually the eyes were open, so that the memory of the living person could be preserved. The decision to leave Harriet’s long-lashed lids closed and record her pallor reveals a need to remember not only the features of a living person, but to fix them in death. Vallée’s image likens death to a blissful sleep, recalling recumbent or reclining mortuary statues from the Middle Ages to the present day. Harriet’s repose suggests the words used by Christ when raising the daughter of Jairus from the dead: Dormit, non est mortua. The serenity of Harriet’s expression, the comfortable pillow behind her head, and the hint of domestic furniture at the lower left envision sleep as a state of transition between home as protective haven in life and heaven as protective home in the afterlife. Later in the century, this idea of a domesticated heaven would serve as comfort in popular images and consolatory poetry. For the wearer [End Page 69] of this locket, the visual metaphor suggests the place the deceased occupied in the mourner’s mind, asleep until they meet again at home in heaven. Harriet followed the English bridal custom of wearing roses in her hair; 4 however, her bridal garland could also be interpreted as a funeral chaplet, a symbol used in ancient times and revived in Revolutionary France, which was given as an offering by the bereaved to the deceased in funerary monuments. 5 Here, the chaplet symbolizes the perpetuation of Harriet’s memory by the person who commissioned this miniature. It also serves as a traditional token of her purity; in Shakespeare’s Hamlet, Ophelia was buried wearing her virgin’s garland. 6 Harriet’s chaplet is adorned with roses; stylized roses...

Academic Outsider at the Paris Salons of the Revolution: The Case of Drawings a la maniere noire

3. Isabey exhibited drawings described as being dans la maniere anglaise at the Exposition de la Jeunesse organized by the painter and dealer J.B. P. Lebrun in the summer of 1791 (no. 101), where they were reported to have attracted the attention of the public (Exposition des tableaux faite par mm. les artistes libres, Collection Deloynes (Cabinet des Estampes, Bibliotheque Nationale, Paris), vol. 17, no. 428, p. 8) and again at the Salon of the same year, although they were not listed in the livret (La Bequille de Voltaire au Salon, seconde et derniere promenade, Coll. Deloynes, vol. 17, no. 439, p. 319). This paper describes one way in which French artists from outside the Academie royale de peinture et sculpture took advantage of developments during the Revolution to invade the Paris Salon. Their works were enthusiastically received, but other artists, former academicians and their pupils, mounted a press campaign against the newcomers. It was not public debate which finally produced a return to more traditional values, but the changing cultural requirements of the ruling elite. The issues raised in the debate, however, helped to redefine the status and qualifications of the professional artist in a post-academic society.' In 1791, the Academie lost its control of the Salon, the biennial exhibition of paintings and sculpture held at the Louvre. The source of its sinecures and status disappeared in 1792, when France ceased to be a monarchy, and the Academie itself was abolished in the following year. Academicians and their pupils were thus deprived of privileges which had included the exclusive right to exhibition in the capital and a monopoly of official commissions. At the same time, economic upheavals and the emigration of wealthy royalists led to a creaming-off of the top end of the market for contemporary art. Academicians complained that their livelihood was threatened by these developments, but it would be a mistake to interpret them as an unmitigated disaster for artists in general. The commissioning of portraits, in particular, was so bound up with social practices, such as courtship and marriage, as to survive all but the worst economic catastrophes. It was, moreover, the humbler sort of portrait specialist who stood to gain most from the demise of the Academie, since such artists were at last free to display their products to potential clients at the Salon. Among those who took advantage of this opportunity were several miniaturists, some of whom modified the appearance of their works in ways evidently designed to enhance their impact at the Salon. Jean-Baptiste Augustin, for example, an artist from Lorraine who had settled in Paris during the previous decade, attracted attention at the Salon of 1796 with a selfportrait en grande miniature (Fig. 1). Over nine inches high, this was a painting large enough to compete with many of the smaller oils on show and much too big to be incorporated into a piece of jewellery, the traditional destination of portrait miniatures.2 Its uselessness for all practical purposes confirmed its status as a work of art.

American portrait miniatures in the Manney collection

American portrait miniatures in the Manney collection

The itinerant photographer in Britain 1850–1880

Abstract ‘For many years most of the early daguerreotypists were birds of passage frequently on the wing’ according to John Werge, who began his lifelong photographic career as a daguerreotypist. Werge himself was ‘driven to adopt the nomadic mode of life peculiar to the itinerant photographer’.1 His autobiographical account of the early years of photography records two excursions in the north of England early in the 1850s. Clearly, itinerancy was associated with photography from its infancy in the daguerreotype period. In economic terms, this made sense. The daguerreotype, like its precursor the portrait miniature, was a luxury article. In the 1840s ‘permanent’ studios were established only in those towns which could boast sufficient wealthy inhabitants to sustain a regular flow of business and recoup a level of profit that would justify the significant initial financial investment.2 London, as the capital city, attracted the first studio in March 1841. In the same year studios opened at such fashionable...

Holbein's Portraits of the Steelyard Merchants: An Investigation

Previous articleNext article No AccessHolbein's Portraits of the Steelyard Merchants: An InvestigationThomas S. HolmanThomas S. Holman Search for more articles by this author PDFPDF PLUS Add to favoritesDownload CitationTrack CitationsPermissionsReprints Share onFacebookTwitterLinkedInRedditEmail SectionsMoreDetailsFiguresReferencesCited by Metropolitan Museum Journal Volume 141979 Sponsored by the Metropolitan Museum of Art Article DOIhttps://doi.org/10.2307/1512741 Views: 81Total views on this site Citations: 2Citations are reported from Crossref Copyright 1980 The Metropolitan Museum of ArtPDF download Crossref reports the following articles citing this article:Oren Margolis The Book Half Open, (Jan 2022): 289–310.https://doi.org/10.37050/ci-23_15TERI FITZGERALD, DIARMAID MacCULLOCH Gregory Cromwell: Two Portrait Miniatures by Hans Holbein the Younger, The Journal of Ecclesiastical History 67, no.33 (Jun 2016): 587–601.https://doi.org/10.1017/S0022046915003322

THE RESTORATION OF PORTRAIT MINIATURES

(1972). THE RESTORATION OF PORTRAIT MINIATURES. Studies in Conservation: Vol. 17, Lisbon Congress 1972: Conservation of Paintings and the Graphic Arts, pp. 821-824.

Exhibition of portrait miniatures at South Kensington Museum

Exhibition of portrait miniatures at South Kensington Museum Get access Notes and Queries, Volume s3-VII, Issue 179, 3 June 1865, Page 450, https://doi.org/10.1093/nq/s3-VII.179.450e Published: 03 June 1965

Early English Portrait Miniatures in the Collection of the Duke of Buccleugh

Early English Portrait Miniatures in the Collection of the Duke of Buccleugh

Exhibition of portrait miniatures, South Kensington Museum

Exhibition of portrait miniatures, South Kensington Museum