New Portrait Miniatures Gallery, at The Victoria and Albert Museum
John Donne, in the fifth of his elegies, addresses the interlinked themes of painting and remembrance. The poem is written from the perspective of a lover who has just given his beloved a portrait of himself:
“Here take my Picture; though I bid farewell,
Thine, in my heart, where my soule dwells, shall dwell.
‘Tis like me now, but I dead, ‘twill be more
When we are shadowes both, than ‘twas before.
When weather-beaten I come backe; my hand,
Perhaps with rude oares torne, or Sun-beams tann’d,
My face and brest of hairecloth, and my head
With cares rash sodaine stormes, being o’erspread,
My body a sack of bones, broken within;
And powder’s blew staines scatter’d on my skinne;
If rivalls taxe thee to have lov’d a man,
So foule, and coarse, as, Oh, I may seeme then,
This shall say what I was…”
The kind of painting that the poet had in mind when he wrote those lines was a portrait miniature – a finely worked likeness, painted in watercolour with fine squirrel’s-hair brushes, on a piece of vellum generally no larger than the palm of a new-born baby’s hand. Such pictures were commonly exchanged as lovers’ keepsakes in the upper circles of Elizabethan and Jacobean society, and continued to fan the flames of love, in England, until about the middle of the nineteenth century.
They were paintings designed to be hung, not on a wall, but on a chain, next to the skin, where “the soule dwells”. One of the sexiest of these intimate images is Nicholas Hilliard’s Young Man against a Flame Background, painted probably in the late 1580s, around 20 years before Donne wrote his elegy. A tousle-haired young man, with a light beard, high cheekbones and an ornate fleur-de-lys ear-ring dangling from his right earlobe, gazes out at the viewer, with undisguised passion smouldering in his grey-green eyes. He is dressed for love or to inspire longing, at least, in a bedshirt of white linen, its collar and cuffs worked in fine lace, which is open almost to the midriff. With his left hand, he meaningfully fingers a jewel in an ornate gold setting, which hangs from a chain around this neck. This was almost certainly a locket which would have housed, on its reverse side, close to his heart, a picture of the object of his affections. She herself would, presumably, have owned the likeness of him. This detail, a miniature within a miniature, is tangible evidence of the innate eroticism of the genre.
The miniatures of Hilliard and his most gifted successors amount to some of the most memorable and compelling works of British art. The world’s finest collection of such objects is held by the Victoria and Albert Museum, which owns more than 2,000 of them, yet for the past several years they have had no settled home within the museum. Room for several of the finest was found within the main galleries devoted to British art (where the young man among flames still smoulders). But until now they have had no dedicated gallery of their own. With the opening of the new Portrait Miniatures Gallery, sensitively and intelligently installed by the museum’s expert on the genre, Katherine Coombs, that situation has at long last been remedied.
The allotted space could, admittedly, be a little larger – it allows for the display of only around 150 works from the V & A’s treasure trove of miniatures – but it is never the less an extremely welcome addition to the fabric of the museum. It is not easy to display miniatures to their best effect, because they are such small and light-sensitive objects, but Coombs and the V&A’s technical staff have devised an extremely effective solution to the problem. The works have been arranged within darkened display cases which light up at the visitor’s approach. A liberal supply of magnifying glasses, housed in slots at the side of each case, enables the viewer to appreciate the fine detail and painstaking workmanship that went into the creation of these often exquisite works of art.
The portrait miniature is sometimes thought to be an exclusively English innovation. That is not so, although it is fair to say that the genre was taken to a peak of sophistication by artists working in this country. Among the earliest miniatures in the V&A’s collection are some breathtaking and almost tremblingly alive likenesses of Tudor ladies and gentlemen, painted by Henry VIII’s court artist Hans Holbein – who came to England from Basel.
The origins of this particular species of art are to be found in the etymology of the term “miniature” itself. The word derives not, as might be expected, from that family of diminutives incorporating the Latin min, but from the quite different Latin word, “miniare”, which literally means “to colour with red lead”. The term described the traditional technique used by medieval artists throughout Europe to create illuminated manuscripts, painted in heightened watercolour on vellum. The V&A’s new display succinctly alludes to the miniature’s origins, in book illustration, in the first of its display cases, which juxtaposes a pair of fine pages showing “activities of the months” with a solemn self-portrait by the manuscript illuminator Simon Benninck. Painted in 1558, this shows the artist at work at a sloping easel, close to a leaded glass window, clutching a pair of glasses in his left hand. His brow is furrowed, as if to stress the eye-straining demands of his chosen profession – a hazard of the job frequently lamented by later, English miniaturists.
The rise of the portrait miniature, which developed directly out of the tradition embodied by Benninck, coincided with the decline of manuscript illumination brought about by the advent of the printed book. A technique that had once been used to create fine illuminated bibles and psalters and books of hours was adapted to the production of unique, individual works of art. So the miniature is, among other things, a capsule of changing patterns of artistic production and consumption – an instance of the migration of skills from one, imperilled genre to another.
It is hard to say exactly why the miniature should have caught on in England in the way that it did, but the answer may well lie in the circumstances of the Reformation. The wholesale destruction of the nation’s religious art, by the zealous iconoclasts of the Church of England, seems to have created a correspondingly great hunger for secular imagery on the part of a suddenly imageless people. At the same time, the nation’s artists, who had previously made a living by creating work for churches but now found that avenue of opportunity closed to them, poured their energies into the few genres, like portraiture, tolerated by the Protestant faith. So while Catholic Europe was to see the flowering of the Baroque style, with its dramatic emphasis on large scale, bravura performance by painters and sculptors alike, English art contracted to a scale that could be measured in inches. This may in part account for the extraordinary intensity of the finest English miniatures, the way in which they radiate energy like shrunken suns in distant galaxies. They were produced at a time when the entire visual art tradition of the nation was bound, as Hamlet might have put it, within a nutshell.
Nicholas Hilliard, the artist who, more than any other, established miniature painting as one of the pre-eminent genres of English art, was also one of the first artists to practice “limning”, as it was known, to the exclusion of almost every other activity. Hilliard originally trained as a goldsmith, and his apprenticeship left its traces in his work as a miniaturist, characterised as it is by jewel-like delicacy and vividness of colour. Hilliard shows little interest in effects of spatial perspective, setting his figures against blank backgrounds or implicating them in symbolic settings as highly wrought as masterpieces of Mannerist goldsmithery. Heart-struck fidelity is, most commonly, the emotion projected by his male sitters. A bearded young man wearing a splendidly ornate feathered hat clasps a disembodied hand that reaches down to him from a cloud – an allusion, perhaps, to one loved but now departed from this life. Another of these wistful Elizabethan anonymes, Hilliard’s Young Man Among Roses, of around 1587, leans against a treetrunk while white eglantine roses twine around him in profusion. He wears white tights and a patterned jerkin surmounted by an extravagant lace ruff, a black mantle hanging nonchalantly from his shoulder. The heart-sick languor of these Elizabethan courtiers is probably not to be taken entirely at face value, since these images were part of the intricate fabric of Elizabethan realpolitik. The Young Man Among Roses wears the colours, black and white, of Elizabeth herself. Images such as this were not straightforward amorous declarations, but statements of fealty to the Virgin Queen herself – part of the elaborate and partly Platonic dance of courtship in which she involved her male court followers. Many such miniatures must have been presented to her by those seeking favour or advancement.
Hilliard’s manuscript The Art of Limning, written in 1598, is one of the first English texts about art, and a testament to his conscientious pursuit of virtuosity in his choen medium. The artist insists that the limner’s life be grounded in temperance, with no “violent exercise in sports”, although some dancing and a little light exertion in playing bowls was permitted. The limner required a well lit work space, hard to find among the crowded alleys of as medieval city like sixteenth-century London, and the room must above all be kept clean. The artist should wear clothes of silk, “such as sheddeth least dust or hair”, take heed “of the dandruff of the head” and avoid speaking or even breathing over his work to avoid “sparkling of spittle” on the fragile skin of watercolour. Only the finest materials should be used. Where possible, Hilliard recommended that the painter obtain vellum made from the skin of an aborted cow’s foetus: “virgin parchment, such as never bore hair.”
He was clearly a forceful personality as well as a literate man, and he seems to have got on well with Elizabeth I herself – a relationship which did much to strengthen the position of the miniature painter in English society as a whole. In The Art of Limning, Hilliard proudly records his first encounter with the monarch, recalling her interest in the question of how and where she might sit to him to her best advantage. In the end, she chose “the open valley of a goodly garden, where no tree was near.” The V & A’s display contains several of the fruits of Hilliard’s meetings with Elizabeth, including one shockingly realistic depiction of the queen, sans cosmetics and sans teeth, in around her fiftieth year. This is the only extant image to record her actual appearance, and it is tellingly left at the stage of the sketch, an aide-memoire rather than a finished work of art. In his official court productions for Elizabeth, Hilliard froze her in time and space, presenting her to the world as a glassily perfect creature with an ublemished complexion, as white as porcelain – the Virgin Queen of her state propaganda, unaltered and unalterable by the passage of time.
The greatest of Hilliard’s followers, Isaac Oliver and Samuel Cooper, are also amply represented within the V&A’s new gallery. In different ways, each of these artists removes the miniature from its origins in manuscript illumination and brings it in line with developments in easel painting. Oliver introduces a sense of late Mannerist flourish to the genre, swathing his sitters in elaborate drapery while also modelling their faces much more vividly in light and shade than Hilliard had ever done. Cooper imparts a breadth of handling and sense of Baroque glamour to his sitters, especially those members of the Stuart court who sat to him after the Restoration and the crowning of James II. These are well known artists, but the display also contains some wonderful surprises, such as a series of beautifully frank, tender and humane miniatures of her family and friends created, not for gain, but as personal mementoes, by Susannah Penelope-Ross – the grand-daughter of Richard Gibson, “Dick the dwarf”, who had been one of the leading miniaturists during the time of Cromwell.
The display moves gradually and entertainingly forwards to the nineteenth century, by which time the genre was still sufficiently integral a part of English life for Jane Austen, famously, to compare her own work as a novelist to that of a miniaturist working on a “little two-inch piece of ivory” – which had, by then, replaced vellum in the studios of most miniature painters. But within a few decades it was dead, killed off by the advent of the photograph, which rapidly displaced the miniature in the lockets of those wishing to carry the images of their loved ones wherever they went. There is no better place to trace the evolution of this extinct but once vigorous species of art than the V&A’s new Portrait Miniatures Gallery.
Date: 20-03-2005
Owning Institution: Victoria and Albert Museum
Publication:
Sunday Telegraph Reviews 2004-2010
Subject:
Renaissance Middle Ages & Earlier 17th Century
John Donne, in the fifth of his elegies, addresses the interlinked themes of painting and remembrance. The poem is written from the perspective of a lover who has just given his beloved a portrait of himself:“Here take my Picture; though I bid farewell,
Thine, in my heart, where my soule dwells, shall dwell.
‘Tis like me now, but I dead, ‘twill be more
When we are shadowes both, than ‘twas before.
When weather-beaten I come backe; my hand,
Perhaps with rude oares torne, or Sun-beams tann’d,
My face and brest of hairecloth, and my head
With cares rash sodaine stormes, being o’erspread,
My body a sack of bones, broken within;
And powder’s blew staines scatter’d on my skinne;
If rivalls taxe thee to have lov’d a man,
So foule, and coarse, as, Oh, I may seeme then,
This shall say what I was…”
The kind of painting that the poet had in mind when he wrote those lines was a portrait miniature – a finely worked likeness, painted in watercolour with fine squirrel’s-hair brushes, on a piece of vellum generally no larger than the palm of a new-born baby’s hand. Such pictures were commonly exchanged as lovers’ keepsakes in the upper circles of Elizabethan and Jacobean society, and continued to fan the flames of love, in England, until about the middle of the nineteenth century.
They were paintings designed to be hung, not on a wall, but on a chain, next to the skin, where “the soule dwells”. One of the sexiest of these intimate images is Nicholas Hilliard’s Young Man against a Flame Background, painted probably in the late 1580s, around 20 years before Donne wrote his elegy. A tousle-haired young man, with a light beard, high cheekbones and an ornate fleur-de-lys ear-ring dangling from his right earlobe, gazes out at the viewer, with undisguised passion smouldering in his grey-green eyes. He is dressed for love or to inspire longing, at least, in a bedshirt of white linen, its collar and cuffs worked in fine lace, which is open almost to the midriff. With his left hand, he meaningfully fingers a jewel in an ornate gold setting, which hangs from a chain around this neck. This was almost certainly a locket which would have housed, on its reverse side, close to his heart, a picture of the object of his affections. She herself would, presumably, have owned the likeness of him. This detail, a miniature within a miniature, is tangible evidence of the innate eroticism of the genre.
The miniatures of Hilliard and his most gifted successors amount to some of the most memorable and compelling works of British art. The world’s finest collection of such objects is held by the Victoria and Albert Museum, which owns more than 2,000 of them, yet for the past several years they have had no settled home within the museum. Room for several of the finest was found within the main galleries devoted to British art (where the young man among flames still smoulders). But until now they have had no dedicated gallery of their own. With the opening of the new Portrait Miniatures Gallery, sensitively and intelligently installed by the museum’s expert on the genre, Katherine Coombs, that situation has at long last been remedied.
The allotted space could, admittedly, be a little larger – it allows for the display of only around 150 works from the V & A’s treasure trove of miniatures – but it is never the less an extremely welcome addition to the fabric of the museum. It is not easy to display miniatures to their best effect, because they are such small and light-sensitive objects, but Coombs and the V&A’s technical staff have devised an extremely effective solution to the problem. The works have been arranged within darkened display cases which light up at the visitor’s approach. A liberal supply of magnifying glasses, housed in slots at the side of each case, enables the viewer to appreciate the fine detail and painstaking workmanship that went into the creation of these often exquisite works of art.
The portrait miniature is sometimes thought to be an exclusively English innovation. That is not so, although it is fair to say that the genre was taken to a peak of sophistication by artists working in this country. Among the earliest miniatures in the V&A’s collection are some breathtaking and almost tremblingly alive likenesses of Tudor ladies and gentlemen, painted by Henry VIII’s court artist Hans Holbein – who came to England from Basel.
The origins of this particular species of art are to be found in the etymology of the term “miniature” itself. The word derives not, as might be expected, from that family of diminutives incorporating the Latin min, but from the quite different Latin word, “miniare”, which literally means “to colour with red lead”. The term described the traditional technique used by medieval artists throughout Europe to create illuminated manuscripts, painted in heightened watercolour on vellum. The V&A’s new display succinctly alludes to the miniature’s origins, in book illustration, in the first of its display cases, which juxtaposes a pair of fine pages showing “activities of the months” with a solemn self-portrait by the manuscript illuminator Simon Benninck. Painted in 1558, this shows the artist at work at a sloping easel, close to a leaded glass window, clutching a pair of glasses in his left hand. His brow is furrowed, as if to stress the eye-straining demands of his chosen profession – a hazard of the job frequently lamented by later, English miniaturists.
The rise of the portrait miniature, which developed directly out of the tradition embodied by Benninck, coincided with the decline of manuscript illumination brought about by the advent of the printed book. A technique that had once been used to create fine illuminated bibles and psalters and books of hours was adapted to the production of unique, individual works of art. So the miniature is, among other things, a capsule of changing patterns of artistic production and consumption – an instance of the migration of skills from one, imperilled genre to another.
It is hard to say exactly why the miniature should have caught on in England in the way that it did, but the answer may well lie in the circumstances of the Reformation. The wholesale destruction of the nation’s religious art, by the zealous iconoclasts of the Church of England, seems to have created a correspondingly great hunger for secular imagery on the part of a suddenly imageless people. At the same time, the nation’s artists, who had previously made a living by creating work for churches but now found that avenue of opportunity closed to them, poured their energies into the few genres, like portraiture, tolerated by the Protestant faith. So while Catholic Europe was to see the flowering of the Baroque style, with its dramatic emphasis on large scale, bravura performance by painters and sculptors alike, English art contracted to a scale that could be measured in inches. This may in part account for the extraordinary intensity of the finest English miniatures, the way in which they radiate energy like shrunken suns in distant galaxies. They were produced at a time when the entire visual art tradition of the nation was bound, as Hamlet might have put it, within a nutshell.
Nicholas Hilliard, the artist who, more than any other, established miniature painting as one of the pre-eminent genres of English art, was also one of the first artists to practice “limning”, as it was known, to the exclusion of almost every other activity. Hilliard originally trained as a goldsmith, and his apprenticeship left its traces in his work as a miniaturist, characterised as it is by jewel-like delicacy and vividness of colour. Hilliard shows little interest in effects of spatial perspective, setting his figures against blank backgrounds or implicating them in symbolic settings as highly wrought as masterpieces of Mannerist goldsmithery. Heart-struck fidelity is, most commonly, the emotion projected by his male sitters. A bearded young man wearing a splendidly ornate feathered hat clasps a disembodied hand that reaches down to him from a cloud – an allusion, perhaps, to one loved but now departed from this life. Another of these wistful Elizabethan anonymes, Hilliard’s Young Man Among Roses, of around 1587, leans against a treetrunk while white eglantine roses twine around him in profusion. He wears white tights and a patterned jerkin surmounted by an extravagant lace ruff, a black mantle hanging nonchalantly from his shoulder. The heart-sick languor of these Elizabethan courtiers is probably not to be taken entirely at face value, since these images were part of the intricate fabric of Elizabethan realpolitik. The Young Man Among Roses wears the colours, black and white, of Elizabeth herself. Images such as this were not straightforward amorous declarations, but statements of fealty to the Virgin Queen herself – part of the elaborate and partly Platonic dance of courtship in which she involved her male court followers. Many such miniatures must have been presented to her by those seeking favour or advancement.
Hilliard’s manuscript The Art of Limning, written in 1598, is one of the first English texts about art, and a testament to his conscientious pursuit of virtuosity in his choen medium. The artist insists that the limner’s life be grounded in temperance, with no “violent exercise in sports”, although some dancing and a little light exertion in playing bowls was permitted. The limner required a well lit work space, hard to find among the crowded alleys of as medieval city like sixteenth-century London, and the room must above all be kept clean. The artist should wear clothes of silk, “such as sheddeth least dust or hair”, take heed “of the dandruff of the head” and avoid speaking or even breathing over his work to avoid “sparkling of spittle” on the fragile skin of watercolour. Only the finest materials should be used. Where possible, Hilliard recommended that the painter obtain vellum made from the skin of an aborted cow’s foetus: “virgin parchment, such as never bore hair.”
He was clearly a forceful personality as well as a literate man, and he seems to have got on well with Elizabeth I herself – a relationship which did much to strengthen the position of the miniature painter in English society as a whole. In The Art of Limning, Hilliard proudly records his first encounter with the monarch, recalling her interest in the question of how and where she might sit to him to her best advantage. In the end, she chose “the open valley of a goodly garden, where no tree was near.” The V & A’s display contains several of the fruits of Hilliard’s meetings with Elizabeth, including one shockingly realistic depiction of the queen, sans cosmetics and sans teeth, in around her fiftieth year. This is the only extant image to record her actual appearance, and it is tellingly left at the stage of the sketch, an aide-memoire rather than a finished work of art. In his official court productions for Elizabeth, Hilliard froze her in time and space, presenting her to the world as a glassily perfect creature with an ublemished complexion, as white as porcelain – the Virgin Queen of her state propaganda, unaltered and unalterable by the passage of time.
The greatest of Hilliard’s followers, Isaac Oliver and Samuel Cooper, are also amply represented within the V&A’s new gallery. In different ways, each of these artists removes the miniature from its origins in manuscript illumination and brings it in line with developments in easel painting. Oliver introduces a sense of late Mannerist flourish to the genre, swathing his sitters in elaborate drapery while also modelling their faces much more vividly in light and shade than Hilliard had ever done. Cooper imparts a breadth of handling and sense of Baroque glamour to his sitters, especially those members of the Stuart court who sat to him after the Restoration and the crowning of James II. These are well known artists, but the display also contains some wonderful surprises, such as a series of beautifully frank, tender and humane miniatures of her family and friends created, not for gain, but as personal mementoes, by Susannah Penelope-Ross – the grand-daughter of Richard Gibson, “Dick the dwarf”, who had been one of the leading miniaturists during the time of Cromwell.
The display moves gradually and entertainingly forwards to the nineteenth century, by which time the genre was still sufficiently integral a part of English life for Jane Austen, famously, to compare her own work as a novelist to that of a miniaturist working on a “little two-inch piece of ivory” – which had, by then, replaced vellum in the studios of most miniature painters. But within a few decades it was dead, killed off by the advent of the photograph, which rapidly displaced the miniature in the lockets of those wishing to carry the images of their loved ones wherever they went. There is no better place to trace the evolution of this extinct but once vigorous species of art than the V&A’s new Portrait Miniatures Gallery.
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