Little Big Men (and Women Too)

Looking at European portrait miniatures is like discovering the universe in a drop of pond water. It’s enough to make you slack-jawed.

In technical terms, great portrait miniatures certainly dazzle. When you’ve got a painting whose convincing likeness of a person is rendered in teensy dimensions that may be less than an inch or two, an element of “gee whiz!” fascination is inevitable.

Still, there’s something about the experience of encountering these portraits that is distinctive and particular. It’s completely different from that which describes an encounter with any other kind of portrait painting.

To find out what it is, go directly to the Huntington Library, Art Collections and Botanical Gardens in San Marino, where a wonderful loan exhibition from Windsor Castle opened last week. The traveling show, “Masterpieces in Little: Portrait Miniatures From the Collection of Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II,” offers a concise history of miniatures, from start to finish: its sudden rise in the 16th century at the Renaissance court of Henry VIII, its circuitous path over the next 200 years and, finally, its eventual fall and disappearance in the 19th century.

This story is concisely told in 75 well-chosen examples, selected from the nearly 3,000 miniatures in the royal collection. In part because the little paintings are usually housed in the private apartments at Windsor Castle, many of those now at the Huntington have never before been seen in public. The show provides an unprecedented opportunity.

The other reason portrait miniatures aren’t often seen is that most are painted in watercolor on vellum, a parchment made from calf- or lambskin, or else on thin sheets of ivory; watercolor’s sensitivity to light means the paintings must typically be stored in darkness. (Exhibition lighting in the Huntington’s upstairs gallery, where the show is handsomely installed in nine cases styled like crisp Neoclassical temples, is kept very low; it takes a while for your eyes to adjust.) Like medieval manuscripts, whose pictures can look remarkably fresh and whose colors can be startlingly bright and clear, despite having been painted centuries ago, miniatures can seem to have just come from the artist’s studio.

The analogy to medieval manuscripts is also apt because that’s where miniatures, as a new and independent genre of painting, trace their parenthood. Portraits of patrons (and others) began to appear in the decoration of painted books, often in an oval format that recalled Roman coins or antique portraits. For sturdiness as a separate miniature, the watercolor on vellum would be mounted on a piece of heavy cardboard--typically a playing card cut down for the purpose--and set in a frame of carved and gilded wood or metal.

Lucas Hornebolte (c. 1505-1544), a Belgian book illuminator who came to London while still in his teens and went to work for Henry VIII, is believed to have been the first painter of independent portrait miniatures. Two tiny works by Hornebolte open the show, and they introduce the new genre at a very high level of sophistication.

One is a delicate likeness of Hornebolte’s famous patron, executed in the bust-length, three-quarter view that, thanks to the fame of Leonardo da Vinci’s “Mona Lisa,” had become the most fashionable format for Renaissance portraits. The other is among the show’s most mesmerizing images: a tiny, touching picture of Henry Fitzroy, Duke of Richmond, the king’s illegitimate son who succumbed to tuberculosis at 17. Hornebolte shows him less than two years before his death, dressed in bed clothes and fitted nightcap, a yellowish pallor rising in the pink of his cheeks and darkening gray circles beneath his eyes.

However compelling these two miniatures are, the ante is immediately upped in four adjacent examples by Hans Holbein the Younger (1497/8-1543). The German artist had been trained as a painter by his celebrated father. Although roughly the same age as Hornebolte, he was taught the miniaturist’s art by his Belgian colleague--whose work he promptly eclipsed. The crispness and clarity of Holbein’s portraits give them an extraordinary presence.

A sense of highly individuated personality also emerges in his work, especially in two miniatures that depict the little Brandon brothers. Henry Brandon became the 2nd Duke of Suffolk at the age of 10; at his untimely death five years later, his younger brother Charles succeeded him--but only for about an hour, before he, too, succumbed to sickness. Holbein’s portraits show them several years earlier as precociously self-possessed little boys, their body language speaking somewhere between the playful innocence of childhood and the restrained hauteur of aristocrats-in-training.

Next come two exquisitely adept paintings by Francois Clouet (c. 1520-1572), the great French court painter to Francis I. Unlike Hornebolte and Holbein, Clouet did not work in England, where the fashion for portrait miniatures was born. Yet the stunning refinement of his work shows how quickly the new genre had spread to adoring continental courts.

Miniatures were often worn as lockets or pinned to clothing, as personal emblems of political affiliation or even gestures of propaganda. (Think of them as precious, one-of-a-kind versions of mass-produced tintype photo buttons of Abraham Lincoln, as appropriate to the florid intricacies of Renaissance court life as the photo buttons were to the presidential campaign of a plain-spoken young democracy.) Sometimes, a painted miniature would be sent abroad on a documentary mission, as an identifying image for a prospective arranged marriage.

Whatever the uses, which are helpfully discussed in the show’s fine catalog, it’s instructive that the first great miniaturists you find in the exhibition were Belgian, German and French, even though the fashion for miniatures originated in England. Not until the arrival on the scene of Nicholas Hilliard (1547-1619)--who was born in Exeter the same year Henry VIII died, and three years after Lucas Hornebolte died--could England boast a native son whose miniatures rivaled what had come in the generation before.

The show continues its dazzling thumbnail march through history, with especially notable examples by Isaac Oliver (c. 1565-1617), John Hoskins (c. 1595-1665) and Samuel Cooper (c. 1608-1672). I don’t have much taste for most of the 18th and 19th century works on view, which seem either forced hothouse confections (the former) or desperately confused about their purpose in revolutionary Europe (the latter). Still, the Huntington is the perfect venue in which to see the exhibition.

The Huntington boasts its own fine collection of about 130 English portrait miniatures, a collection especially rich in examples by the fashionable, late-18th century painter Richard Cosway, who revived the genre after a period of relative stagnation; a number are on display in the museum’s permanent collection. More to the point, though, it also houses an important collection of English portraiture of the more common easel variety and the big, highly theatrical, publicly pitched Grand Manner style.

After you’ve seen “Masterpieces in Little,” take a look at some of these big pictures in the museum’s other galleries. The difference from the encounter with portrait miniatures couldn’t be more pronounced.

The little portraits are one-on-one, even secured behind glass in protective display cases. They demand to be looked at closely--to be scrutinized in order to be seen in all their dazzling refinement. These are painted faces you encounter nose to nose. The intimacy of the experience heightens the illusion’s inescapable power, making you think you’re looking deep into the inmost character of another human being. It’s a disconcerting sight.

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“MASTERPIECES IN LITTLE,” Huntington Library, 1151 Oxford Road, San Marino. Dates: Tuesdays to Fridays, noon to 4:30 p.m.; Saturdays and Sundays, 10:30 a.m. to 4: p.m. Ends April 13. Prices: Adults, $7.50; seniors, $6; students, $4; children under 12, free. Phone: (818) 405-2141.