American Portrait Miniatures

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