I’ve been writing about miniatures recently for Historic Houses. Seek out the exhibition ‘Elizabethan Treasures’ at the National Portrait Gallery if you are interested. And if you think you aren’t, think again. There are lots of reasons for taking a bit of time to study miniatures.
Miniature painting is something that we were rather good at in England; in fact the reason for the NPG exhibition is largely because the artists it celebrates, Nicholas Hilliard and Isaac Oliver, were European leaders of this new type of portraiture at the court of Elizabeth I and James I. The earliest miniaturists (limners in contemporary terminology) were Lucas Horenbout at the court of Henry VIII in England and Jean Clouet at the French court. The production of tiny portraits provided their royal patrons with an ideal propaganda gift, relatively inexpensive but highly personal. For Henry VIII, a man with a clear understanding of the power of propaganda, miniature portraits produced by Horenbout made ideal keepsakes to maintain the loyalty of his courtiers. The notoriously mean Elizabeth I paid her Court Limner, Nicholas Hilliard, so poorly that he was instrumental in increasing the popularity of miniature painting by promoting his art directly to the nobility. By the end of the 16th century, tiny portraits were must-have objects of desire for the upper classes.
You kept a miniature either in your pocket or purse, hung around your neck, in a precious locket, a specially crafted box or in a private ‘cabinet’. It was an intimate object. If you look at the exhibition of 90 works at the NPG, it is striking that a third of the subjects are unknown. If you removed those of royal subjects and close relatives of the artists, the proportion rises to nearly half. How come we don’t know who these people are, the exquisitely rendered faces in rich garments looking lovelorn or smugly successful?
We need to understand why and to whom they were presented and what happened to them. The evidence is in surviving private collections. I looked at two superb private collections of miniatures, both of which can be visited and both of which have made loans to the NPG exhibition. They are at Burghley House in Lincolnshire and Bowhill House in the Borders. The collections are slightly different in that the Burghley Collection started from a bequest in the 17th century and grew organically, whereas the Bowhill miniatures were deliberately collected in the mid to late 19th century. Another great private collection of miniatures is at Welbeck Abbey and normally on show in the Harley Gallery* on the estate. This, like Bowhill, was carefully purchased and curated in the late 19th century.
There are few unknown men and women at Burghley; rather more at the other two collections. The reason is simple, miniatures are family mementoes and at Burghley, the Cecil family has remembered who they are. So, the chubby gent with long brown hair, painted around 1670, is Thomas Chambers, the wealthy owner of an iron foundry in Derby. He is here because he was brought here as a keepsake by his daughter Hannah Sophia on her marriage to Brownlow, 8th Earl of Exeter. Similarly, there are miniature portraits of the Earl and Countess of Longford, the parents of Georgiana, wife of the 3rd Marquess of Exeter and of Elizabeth Ponytz, mother of another heiress, Isabella Poyntz, who married into the Cecil family in 1824.
The handsome fellow with bright blue eyes and a spotty cravat is parliamentarian Sir Thomas Whichcote Bt, father of Isabella, who became Marchioness of Exeter in 1875 when she was just 18. Each of these women, leaving home for a new life with a new husband, quite understandably brought with them small portraits of their parents. You can see how, if the Burghley House Collection had been split up and sold, the attribution of these little works of art with only a secondary connection with the family, could have been lost. By remaining at Burghley, they tell a more interesting story.
So, when you come across a collection of miniature portraits at a historic house this summer, get your glasses out and think about who they are and how they got there. Often they will be parents or lovers , brothers or suitors brought into the family and maybe even cried over by someone in the past. They are intensely personal and really help us relate to the stories of individuals over the centuries. They are also often stunning works of art, and if later painters only occasionally matched the skill of Hilliard and Oliver, they still bring the characters who commissioned them to life for us. Let's celebrate our great miniature painters, not just Hilliard and Oliver, but pioneer Lucas Horenbout and all those that succeeded them in later centuries.
*The Portland Collection is closed to visitors for the time being after the theft of the irreplaceable Portland Tiara last December.