Portrait Miniatures Research Articles

Miniaturists — Graduates of the Imperial Academy of Arts on the Modern Art Market

Graduates of the portrait miniature class at the Imperial Academy of Arts, which operated for more than half a century, were many first-class miniaturists whose names are now, unfortunately, known only to specialists. By now, most leading museums have published their collections of portrait miniatures, but historically, none of the researchers have considered the study of the art market (and the miniatures of academician artists appearing on it) as an opportunity, firstly, to identify new works of miniature art, and secondly, to find out whether an artist’s academic education or title influences contemporary pricing and the interest of buyers (which can be private collectors or museums) in his works.Nevertheless, it is the information on the functioning of the art market that provides data for more in-depth and comprehensive research. Thus, the sales index of a certain author much more clearly than numerous exhibitions can show its demand among art lovers. It should be noted that not all users of auction platforms are professional collectors. There are cases when personal exhibitions of artists did not contribute to the growth of interest in their work on the part of art collectors. There is also an opposite situation, when works by artists about whom only a rare researcher knows become a desiderata for many collectors. The present study expands the understanding of the place on the contemporary art market of Russian miniaturists associated with the Academy of Arts (its graduates and academicians), and makes it possible to fill in the gaps in the attribution and identification of the peculiarities of their works. It is concluded that there is no direct connection between the fact of studying at the Imperial Academy of Arts and the prices of their works, but the high artistic level of miniatures allows us to say that the title of academician was indeed given to the most worthy masters.

Bismuth White (Bismuth Oxychloride) and Its Use in Portrait Miniatures Painted by George Engleheart

Bismuth White (Bismuth Oxychloride) and Its Use in Portrait Miniatures Painted by George Engleheart

Influence of Accurate Attribution on Preservation of Historical Portrait Miniatures

Influence of Accurate Attribution on Preservation of Historical Portrait Miniatures

The Foods of Love? Food Gifts, Courtship and Emotions in Long Eighteenth-Century England

Abstract This article rediscovers the importance of food gifts in navigating the process of courtship in England during the long eighteenth century. Studies of courtship and gift-exchange to date have demonstrated how courting couples exchanged a wide range of gifts to produce and intensify feelings of love and advance their relationships toward the altar, from garters and gloves to ribbons, rings, portrait miniatures and locks of hair. Yet the edible gift has remained conspicuously absent from this picture. The article reinserts edible tokens into the historiography of love and marriage, revealing how they operated as an indispensable and unique part of the ‘gift mode’ during courtship. It demonstrates how courting couples exchanged a wide range of foodstuffs from cakes and sweetmeats to game, fowl, fish, exotic fruits and home-grown produce. In doing so, the article advances the burgeoning field of emotions and material culture by demonstrating how organic or perishable items could function as powerful emotional objects, able to nourish the human body, provide a source of sensual and gustatory pleasure and elicit feelings of joy, delight, love and desire. In turn, these gifts show courtship made everyday, transacted between couples and their families, and situated in gardens and squares, shops, theatres and around a family's tea table.

Stages of Collecting European Portrait Miniatures of the 16th – 19th Centuries

The purpose of the article is to ascertain the stages of collecting European portrait miniature of the 16th – 19th century from the outset of this art until now as an important factor for the research of the Bohdan and Varvara Khanenko National Museum of Arts miniatures, Kyiv. The research methodology is based on historiographical analysis coupled with axiological and holistic approaches to identify the relationship between the history of collecting and the evolution of the art of portrait miniature. The scientific novelty of the article lies in determining the general trends in collecting works to clarify the reasons for collecting European portrait miniatures in Ukraine, inter alia, at the Bohdan and Varvara Khanenko National Museum of Arts in Kyiv. Conclusions. Transformation of portrait miniature from an object of private property to a museum artefact began in the 17th century. Portrait miniature was recognised as a separate artistic genre. The processes of studying the term “miniature portrait”, researching of the art tradition, and creating the first museum’s collections were launched. It was at that time that the core of the miniatures collection was set up by its founders in the Bohdan and Varvara Khanenko National Museum of Arts. Now it is one of the greatest in Ukraine. Understanding of the artworks value have been proceeding during decline of demand for the traditional portrait miniature after invention of daguerreotype. Nowadays, the works are of interest to collectors, but the painting tradition continues only among amateurs. 
 Keywords: portrait, painting, miniature, European miniature, collection, history, research, the Bohdan and Varvara Khanenko National Museum of Arts.

Miniatura důstojníka 8. pěšího pluku rakouské armády. Nová akvizice Národního muzea od Patrizia Kettnera z roku 1836

The article explores a signed and dated portrait miniature of an officer by the painter Patrizio Kittner (1809–1900) from Brno, which was previously unknown. The aim of the text is to present Kittner’s portrait miniature through formal, stylistic and contextual analysis. The introduction focuses on the forgotten miniature painter’s personality, his artistic background, and his work for commissioners among the Moravian aristocracy and leading industrialists. It then proceeds with a formal description of the portrait miniature, its condition having been carefully assessed after the National Museum’s restorer removed the painting from its frame and disassembled the entire miniature into its individual components. This is followed by an analysis of Kittner’s painting style, which was examined using two portable microscopes: Dino-Lite type AM4115ZT for normal light images and Dino-Lite type AD4113T-12V for infrared images. Signed portrait miniatures from the Moravian Gallery in Brno served as adequate comparative ma­terial. The text then discusses the context of the work’s creation and identifies Kittner’s commissioners from the ranks of the Austrian army, evaluating the soldier’s rank and classification. The analyses indicate that Kittner’s miniature has been preserved in good technical condition. It is not substantially damaged, but it has undergone previous restoration, as indicated by the retouching on the right part of the man’s chest and in the upper right corner. This is an example of Kittner’s high-quality work, where the painter followed the Viennese portrait style of Moritz Michael Daffinger, known as the Daffinger School. In Kittner’s case, the clear influence of Viennese miniature production is demonstrated primarily through the painting style charac­terised by intersecting brushstrokes and the use of organic dye to depict skin tone. The article concludes by cautiously identifying the depicted figure as Anton Hahn, a lieutenant of the 8th Infantry Regiment of the Austrian Army.

Gold nanoparticles in painted miniatures on ivory: Non-invasive evidence and characterisation

To document the use of gold nanoparticles (also known as “Purple of Cassius” pigment) in miniature painting, seven 19th century portraits from Czech collections containing purple colour were studied. The research was performed non-invasively, as it was not possible to sample the small-sized and delicate paintings. Large area X-ray fluorescence scanning indicated the presence of Purple of Cassius in four paintings, while in the three of them, the desired shade was achieved by mixing red and blue pigments, for example vermillion and Prussian blue. The detected gold nanoparticles were characterised in detail by X-ray powder diffraction and via innovative use of environmental scanning electron microscopy. The obtained diffraction patterns enabled the calculation of average size of the particles, which equalled to 8–14 nm. Based on available historical recipes, the pigment preparation was replicated in laboratory, yielding analogous pigment with similar particle size. For the first time, Purple of Cassius was identified and characterised in portrait miniatures.

"Pretty thing, is it not?—sweet miniature": Portrait Miniatures in Victorian Fiction

"Pretty thing, is it not?—sweet miniature": Portrait Miniatures in Victorian Fiction

Laboratory X-ray powder diffraction as a useful tool for identification of pigments and degradation products in portrait miniatures painted on ivory

Laboratory X-ray powder diffraction as a useful tool for identification of pigments and degradation products in portrait miniatures painted on ivory

Non-Invasive Technical Investigation of English Portrait Miniatures Attributed to Nicholas Hilliard and Isaac Oliver

This study presents the results of the technical investigation carried out on several English portrait miniatures painted in the 16th and 17th century by Nicholas Hilliard and Isaac Oliver, two of the most famous limners working at the Tudor and Stuart courts. The 23 objects chosen for the analysis, spanning almost the entire career of the two artists, belong to the collections of the Victoria and Albert Museum (London) and the Fitzwilliam Museum (Cambridge). A non-invasive scientific methodology, comprising of stereo and optical microscopies, Raman microscopy, and X-ray fluorescence spectroscopy, was required for the investigation of these small-scale and fragile objects. The palettes and working techniques of the two artists were characterised, focusing in particular on the examination of flesh tones, mouths, and eyes. These findings were also compared to the information written in the treatises on miniature painting circulating during the artists’ lifetime. By identifying the materials and techniques most widely employed by the two artists, this study provides information about similarities and differences in their working methods, which can help to understand their artistic practice as well as contribute to matters of attribution.

Complicit Material Culture

Should all historic artifacts owned or utilized by enslavers bear some responsibility for their actions? This case study of a portrait miniature of George Washington and its remarkable journey thro...

Colonial Relations in Miniature: Affective Networks, Race, and the Portrait in Victor Séjour’s “Le Mulâtre”

AbstractThis essay attends to the presence of a small portrait carried by an enslaved character, Georges, in Victor Séjour’s 1837 sketch “Le Mulâtre” (“The Mulatto”). While most eighteenth- and nineteenth-century fiction deploys miniature portraits to mediate social ties and signal emotional connection, in “Le Mulâtre” the carrying of a miniature departs from this trope, marking alienation, not affiliation. Reading Séjour’s text against popular depictions and material histories of ivory portrait miniatures, I demonstrate that these familiar objects of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century life function not merely as emblems of intimacy, as past scholars have argued, but rather as tools of what Elizabeth Maddock Dillon calls “intimate distance”—a social configuration that depends on asserting closeness with geographically distributed white populations while disavowing intimacy with physically present Black and Indigenous peoples. Although the portrait is said to depict Georges’s father, who readers know is also the man’s white enslaver, the object remains hidden from view in a bag until the final moments of the sketch, which concludes with the father’s beheading and the son’s suicide. I argue that by emplotting the miniature in a moment of bloodshed rather than of sentiment, Séjour registers the affective and material violence that undergirds white colonial definitions of the family, and invites broader critical comparison of the ways that both sentimental and colonial structures depend on racialized distributions of affections. In the concluding portion of this essay, I turn to the “little buckskin pouch” containing Alfred’s miniature and consider how its resemblance to Afro-Atlantic folk charms recasts the racialized binaries traditionally advanced by miniature portraits. Viewed as part of a charm, the portrait underscores that whiteness is a ritualized notion dependent on material signifiers.

РОЛЬ РЕФОРМАЦИИ В РАЗВИТИИ АНГЛИЙСКОЙ ПОРТРЕТНОЙ МИНИАТЮРЫ

The appearance of portrait miniature is traditionally dated back to the 16th century when the miniature became a portrait genre. The Reformation processes occurring in Europe at the time also influenced the genesis of forms, technique and style of portrait miniatures. This paper focuses on the factors (related to the Reformation) which affected the formation of new images embodied in H. Holbein’s and N. Hilliard’s works. The rise of the portrait miniature as a new type of portrait, its features, and uniqueness of its properties are explained through the study of certain political, social, and cultural aspects of the Reformation movement in the context of English art.

Portrait Miniatures: Fictionality, Visual Culture, and the Scene of Recognition in Early National America

This essay seeks to expand the geographical and formal scope of the concept of fictionality by examining the self-conscious presentation of fictional beings' nonreferentiality in early American visual culture. Its principal case study is a portrait of Susanna Rowson's popular heroine Charlotte Temple by the New York engraver Cornelius Tiebout, which appeared in an 1809 edition of Rowson's novel. Unpacking this image's dense web of allusions to the painterly tradition of the portrait miniature, and its distinct articulation of the viewer's intimacy with a physically absent subject, the essay argues that Tiebout used these perceptual dynamics to foreground and interrogate the ontological vacancy of Rowson's character. Adopting an intermedial approach to the theorization of fictionality, the essay begins by assessing the long-standing critical neglect of portraits of fictional characters among art historians, before suggesting that Tiebout's image of Charlotte offers a way to connect the operations of visual and literary fictionality through the concept of "recognition"—which, in denoting both the process through which a picture's subject is understood and the reconciliation of separated individuals in anagnoristic plotlines, draws our attention to questions about the nature of personal identity. Extending the investigation of this epistemological intersection between picture-making and narrative-building, the essay goes on to consider word/image relations in Tiebout's Charlotte Temple as they pertain to the logic of "reverse ekphrasis," the instantiation of desire and grief in portrait miniatures, and the wider culture of frontispiece engraving in early America.

Portrait miniature as a work of decorative and applied art

Portrait miniature as a work of decorative and applied art

The origins of the portrait miniature in England

The origins of the portrait miniature in England

Applications of Raman spectroscopy in art and archaeology

Applications of Raman spectroscopy in art and archaeology

Non-invasive identification of lead soaps in painted miniatures.

The lack of an appropriate methodology makes numerous important issues related to miniature paintings unresolved-despite the fact that the portrait miniatures of the seventeenth to the nineteenth century represent a highly specific and significant field of European fine art. One of these issues is represented by chemical degradation of miniatures and its analytical evidence. Fragility, variability of the employed materials, and detailed execution make their analysis highly challenging-since no sampling is usually allowed and any change on their surface is immediately noticeable. Therefore, this study focused on finding a fully non-invasive multi-analytical approach to describe degradation processes resulting from the interaction of lead pigments and oils. For this purpose, a representative set of miniature portraits on various supports (ivory, metal, glass) has been selected. For the first time, Pb carboxylates (lead soaps) have been evidenced in miniatures painted in oil and also in a combined technique (gum + oil). Their distribution and crystallinity was described by a combination of X-ray-based (X-ray fluorescence and X-ray diffraction) and micro-spectroscopic methods. At the same time, a number of new findings about the employed painting technique and involvement of various pigments in the degradation processes were obtained. For example, a possible saponification of a mixed Pb-Sn-Sb yellow was indicated for the first time. Although the degradation is clearly at an advanced stage, it has not shown yet any visible symptoms that might warn restorers and curators. Therefore, without targeted analysis, it would remain overlooked.

Game of Thrones: Early Modern Playing Cards and Portrait Miniature Painting

Game of Thrones: Early Modern Playing Cards and Portrait Miniature Painting

New evidence for the intentional use of calomel as a white pigment

AbstractIn this work, we report the results of the in situ application of micro‐Raman spectroscopy to the analysis of two historic painted objects: a 15th‐century illuminated manuscript and a late 16th‐century portrait miniature. Both objects were unexpectedly found to contain calomel (Hg2Cl2), intentionally used as a white pigment. Calomel was a widespread and popular medicine until it fell out of use at the end of the 19th century due to its toxicity, and a material called ‘mercury white’ is referred to in 16th‐century technical literature on painting. However, although calomel has been recognised in the past as a degradation product of cinnabar in both wall and easel paintings, its deliberate use as a pigment on cultural heritage objects has only been documented recently in white areas painted on 17th‐century South American objects. The present study describes the first ever verified use of calomel as a white pigment on European works of art, both of which predate its documented use in South America.