From the November 2024 issue of Apollo. Preview and subscribe here.
In his treatise The Arte of Limning, written around 1600, the miniaturist Nicholas Hilliard recalls the first time that Elizabeth I came to sit for him. During the sitting, the Queen told Hilliard that she preferred drawings where little shade was cast across the sitter’s face; she ‘therefore chose her place to sit in for that purpose in the open alley of a goodly garden, where no tree was near, nor any shadow at all’. More than half a century later, the Lord Protector of republican England, Oliver Cromwell, is thought to have said to the miniaturist Samuel Cooper that he would like to be painted with ‘pimples, warts and everything as you see me’. (It is from this that we derive the expression ‘warts and all’.)
Even for heads of state, then, sitting for a portrait miniature was an inherently intimate experience in which artist and sitter were brought into close contact with each other. Since the paintings needed, as Hilliard put it, ‘to be viewed […] in the hand near unto the eye’, in the age before photography, looking at a portrait miniature was perhaps the closest you could get to the living, breathing reality of someone who was not there. It was largely for this reason that they were exchanged between the courts of Europe to give princes and princesses an idea of how their intended spouses, whom they often had never seen, actually looked.
This intimacy, however, is often lost in museum displays. Miniatures can most often be found in sombre – mainly grey – display cases in which row upon row of centuries-old faces are stacked one above the other. Viewing them in this way can be like looking at an old school photograph taken long ago and at someone else’s school. It is an alienating experience, one from which the thrill that must have been felt by those who commissioned and owned these objects is almost entirely absent.
Nicholas Hilliard’s portrait miniatures of Elizabeth I and Robert Dudley, 1st Earl of Leicester, commissioned by the latter in c. 1575. Private collection. Photo: © Simon Bevan
One of the real triumphs of the exhibition ‘The Reflected Self: Portrait Miniatures, 1540–1850’ at Compton Verney in Warwickshire is the extent to which it recovers a sense of what it must have been like to own, use or display a portrait miniature. Divided into four rooms, the exhibition adopts a chronological approach that takes us from the early days of the portrait miniature in which they were still known as ‘limnings’ and painted on vellum pasted down on to playing cards, to the Victorian period, in which they were painted on thin slivers of ivory by artists struggling to stay relevant as photography grew more popular.
Over this broad historical span, the show encourages us above all to consider these works of art not just as museum pieces but also as objects, which held deeply personal meanings for their owners. Thus, rather than being set out in monotonous rows, we see the miniatures suspended on ribbons from mannequin hands, placed next to examples of genuine 16th-century lace, revolving so as to reveal their reverses, or, in one instance, next to a phone displaying a selfie, a parallel that here seems insightful rather than forced. Accompanying videos, many shot on location at Compton Verney, reinforce the point by showing models dressed in sumptuous replicas of period costume wearing some of these miniatures, holding or brooding over them. Displays of this kind can be rather naff, but here the balance is perfectly struck, the videos working seamlessly with the exhibits to bring these miniatures out from their acetate enclosures and into the real world.
None of this would work were it not for a curatorial team with a deep understanding of these works of art. Few can be better qualified in this regard than co-curator Emma Rutherford, Britain’s foremost expert and dealer in portrait miniatures. For all the razzmatazz of the presentation we never lose sight of historical context or of artistic quality. While we come away from this show keenly aware of how miniatures were used and displayed, we also have close encounters with how they were made, and with the artists of outstanding quality – many of whose names are regrettably known only to specialists – who made them. Levina Teerlinc, Nicholas Hilliard, Isaac Oliver, Samuel Cooper, John Smart, Richard Cosway and Sarah Biffin (who painted despite having been born without arms or legs) were superlative artists and at least as talented, if not more so, than more famous contemporaries who worked in larger formats.
A Boy (n.d.), George Engleheart. Photo: © Jamie Woodley/Compton Verney
In a video at the end of the exhibition, Rutherford argues that it is technique that defines the portrait miniature. Contrary to what the word suggests, the term ‘miniature’ does not refer to the diminutive size of these works. Larger format examples known as ‘cabinet miniatures’ that were made from the 16th century onwards are some of the most ambitious works ever executed in the medium. Instead, as Rutherford explains, the term closely relates to the red pigment minium, used by medieval illuminators. (The earlier term by which they were known, ‘limnings’, has similar origins, coming from the Latin luminare, ‘to illuminate’.)
But if it is a way of making that defines a portrait miniature, this exhibition shows us that it is also a way of relating to images. Miniatures, we learn, were not just likenesses but objects that had the ability to communicate meaning. This can be seen in the words of a 16th-century observer, Edward, Lord Herbert of Cherbury, who is quoted in the exhibition recalling, with an evident frisson, how a lady at court he admired wore his miniature ‘about her neck so low that she yet hid it under her breasts’. In our world, saturated as it is with instant imagery (some of it now generated by AI), it may seem hard to believe that a portrait could speak to us so directly. And yet, if we consider how carefully we might choose a phone background, a profile picture, or an image uploaded to Instagram, perhaps some part of the world of the portrait miniature persists.
‘The Reflected Self: Portrait Miniatures, 1540–1850’ is at Compton Verney, Warwickshire, until 23 February 2025.
From the November 2024 issue of Apollo. Preview and subscribe here.