Why Paint a Portrait the Size of a Coin? Images Meant to Be Carried

A miniature is a portrait small enough to be held in the hand, worn as a locket or kept in a pocket, and everything about the form follows from that. It exists to be private rather than displayed, seen by one person at close range rather than by a room. It travels, which mattered enormously when separation meant years without seeing somebody. It is exchanged, functioning as a token between lovers, family members and allies, and as a diplomatic gift. It is intimate, frequently showing only the head and shoulders and looking directly out. And it is small enough to be concealed, which several surviving examples with hidden compartments and reversible cases confirm was intended.

The technique was specialised and developed over the period:

• •Watercolour on vellum stretched over a playing card, which is the earliest standard method
• •Watercolour on thin sheets of ivory from the eighteenth century, which glows through translucent paint
• •Enamel on metal, fired in a kiln, which is permanent and unusually difficult
• •Extremely fine brushes and stippled or hatched strokes, since blending is impossible at that scale
• •Ground pigments including expensive ultramarine and real gold for highlights
• •Cases of gold, silver, tortoiseshell or leather, frequently with hair or a monogram behind

The form supported a distinct professional community. It emerged in the early sixteenth century from manuscript illumination, which is where the technique and the word came from, and the earliest English practitioners trained in that tradition. It became a court speciality, with named painters attached to royal households and with the resulting works functioning as instruments of diplomacy and patronage. It was among the very few branches of painting in which women worked professionally in substantial numbers and achieved independent reputations, since it could be practised domestically and did not require the studio, models and apprentices that large-scale painting did. Prices were high relative to the size, and a fashionable practitioner could earn substantially.

Miniatures belong to a family of small portable images and the neighbours clarify what each was for. Silhouettes, cut from black paper or painted as a profile, were far cheaper and could be produced in minutes, which put a likeness within reach of people who could never afford a painted miniature. Wax portraits modelled in relief served a comparable market. Medals and coins carry profile portraits that circulate publicly rather than privately, which is the opposite purpose. Hair work, weaving a lock into a design and mounting it in a case, frequently accompanied a miniature and served the same memorial function without any image at all. Photographic formats from the 1850s occupied the whole of this territory within about fifteen years.

Photography destroyed the market within a generation and the reasons are exactly what would be expected. A photographic portrait was faster, cheaper, more accurate as a likeness, and reproducible, and the small photographic formats that appeared from the 1850s occupied precisely the role miniatures had, being cheap enough to be exchanged in quantity and small enough to be carried and collected. Several miniature painters retrained as photographers or as colourists tinting photographs. The craft survived in reduced form and as a revival among specialists, and the historic works moved from private circulation into collections, where they are studied as evidence about dress, jewellery, family relationships and the appearance of people who left no other image.

The form exists to be held, worn, carried and exchanged privately rather than displayed, which is why it is small and why it looks directly out. Watercolour on vellum gave way to watercolour on translucent ivory and to fired enamel. It was one of the few branches of painting where women worked professionally in numbers, and photography destroyed the market within a generation.