A Short History of these Tiny Mementos and the
Personal and Social Significance of them.
“Striking
resemblances that will never fail to perpetuate the tenderness of friendship,
to divert the cares of absence, and to aid affection in dwelling on those
features and that image which death has wrested from us.”
Charles Fraser, Charleston Time, May 27, 1807
It is an art form that flourished from the mid-eighteenth to
the mid nineteenth century, exquisite and intensely personal works of art small
enough to fit in the palm of a hand. Intimate portraits commemorating births,
deaths, engagements, marriages and other unions and separations depicting the
affluent, military leaders, statesmen, an alluring seductress, a ships’
captain, lonely wives and even children painted in watercolor and housed under
glass in finely worked gold lockets, brooches, or bracelets. Ms. Robin Jaffee Frank
associate curator of the Yale University Art Galley and author of Love and Loss: American Portrait and
Mourning Miniatures noted that “the miniature’s rise in popularity in the
North American colonies in the mid-eighteenth century coincided with a greater
emphasis on romantic love, marriage, and affection between parents and children.”
And that “depictions of people wearing miniatures eloquently testify to the
personal and social significance of these tiny mementos.”
A lock of the sitters hair frequently intermingled with the
hair of the person who commissioned the portrait might also be displayed. But
interesting to me is that their hair was often chopped up or dissolved to paint the
mourning miniatures as hair survives time and decay. I knew that the hair from animals such as the horse, sable, and goat are often used as the bristles of an artist brush but I wasn't aware that they also used human hair in this fashion, I thought human hair was reserved for wigs and things of that nature. But another interesting fact
about hair in American history which I became aware of in an episode of Anthony
Bourdain’s “No Reservations” on the Travel Channel is that in Kansas City, MO
there is a hair museum. Among others it houses locks of our country’s
forefathers and their family’s constructed into hair wreaths memorializing and
preserving family tree documentation written on parchment. There are locks from former presidents such as Abraham Lincoln and JFK in the museum and the curator of the
museum said this was the form of genealogy before the invention of the camera
at the end of the 1830’s. Shortly after that, the photograph “eclipsed the
miniature as the primary means of expressing love and loss in portable form.”
Early American portrait miniatures included the work of artists
Benjamin West who painted only one, Charles Willson Peale and John Singleton
Copely. Military leaders, statesmen and our founding father George Washington
both as a public figure and private man became the popular focus displayed on
many items from pendants to snuff boxes after the peace of 1783. It was Washington’s
death that led to a wider market for mourning miniatures inspiring an
unprecedented display by men, women, and children into the nineteenth century.
Demand in the expanding middle class market at the turn of the nineteenth
century was met by Samuel Folwell and scores of miniaturists who flocked to
America. At that time the focus was mainly on romantic tokens serving as
surrogates of absent loved ones or to express a secret passion. Numerous
miniatures were painted by members of the Peale dynasty; James, Charles Willson,
Anna Claypoole, and Raphaelle as well as William Doyle and Sarah Goodridge.
James Peals, John Ramage and Edward Greene Malbone specialized in these
portrait miniatures as did many other skilled and frequently self-taught journeymen
miniaturists whose work has remained anonymous.
www.tfaoi.com/aa/2aa/2aa506.htm
Resource:
Yale Univ. Art Gallery New Haven CT online resource library
Exhibit & Book; Love and Loss: American Portrait and
Mourning Miniatures 10/3-12/30/2000/Robin Jaffee Frank, Yale University Press:
362pp
