"Surrounded with Brilliants": Miniature Portraits in

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"Surrounded with Brilliants": Miniature Portraits
in Eighteenth-Century England
MarciaPointon
Portraits in miniature occupy an uncertain place in art
historical studies. In public galleries they are exhibited in
glass cases covered by cloth to protect them from daylight,
and visitors often walk straight past them. They are seen as a
branch of portraiture, but a minor one; their dimensions
encompass a range from the truly diminutive to a painting too
large to put in a pocket but small enough to be passed around
a dinner table. Their size and the fact that they are often
executed in watercolor relegate them to the margins of a
genre associated widely with grand public images or psychologically penetrating evocations. The miniatures of Queen
Elizabeth I and the work of Nicholas Hilliard are exceptions
that prove the rule. Historians ofjewelry, on the other hand,
view the portrait miniature as incidental; it is the surviving
jeweled case or frame that is the focus of their interest.
Miniatures and the cases or frames in which they were
originally mounted, moreover, are frequently separated and
the miniatures reframed in accordance with a schema that
stresses their presence as images on flat surfaces rather than
as part of a three-dimensional artifact.
My goals in this essay are, first, to establish the importance
of miniatures in European (and particularly in English)
cultural history; second, to think about ways of reconceptualizing the miniature portrait by historically and analytically
reassembling the disparate material components that make
up the whole; and third, to theorize the miniature as a
sentimentally invested artifact by considering it in relation to
ideas about relics and to psychoanalytic explanations of play.
To take the second of these questions as an indication of the
complexity of the field, we may observe that even the
terminology used to describe such artifacts suggests uncertainty and slippage: "support," "case," and "frame" indicate
a diminution of the semantic efficacy ofjeweler's work and a
refusal of the interactive relationship between image and
surround. I therefore opt for "container." Likewise, I shall
refer to "portrait-objects," in order to encompass the full
range of small jeweled artifacts that incorporate portrait
miniatures.
It is, initially, important to recognize that the problem of
the miniature is more extensively a problem of portraiture in
relation to material artifacts more widely defined. When
William Hogarth's friend Jean-Andre Rouquet states that
"portraiture is the kind of painting the most encouraged, and
consequently the most followed in England" and that "it is
the custom, even for men, to present one another with their
pictures," it is not clear what kind of artifact is intended,
though it is generally assumed he is referring to full-scale
portraits.1 Henry Angelo is a little more precise, remarking
that "of all civilized nations, ancient or modern, England
perhaps has manifested the greatest fondness for portraiture,
whether the human character was to be depicted with the
pencil [that is, paintbrush], the chisel, or the pen." In fact, he
might well have added: and displayed on the ceramic, the inn
sign, or the person (Figs. 1, 2).2 Portraiture was, it seems,
relatively as much a part of eighteenth-century urban life as it
is today; it enabled individuals to re-present themselves and
their possessions, ensuring that clothing, jewelry, and personal adornment contributed discursively as well as materially
to the organizing governance of eighteenth-century urban
elites, as well as to the expression and articulation of luxury.3
And in luxury of dress and personal apparel, as the German
visitor Johann Wilhelm von Archenholz observed toward the
end of the century, "England surpasse [d] all other nations of
Europe."4 Miniatures, one aspect of that luxury, were ambulant portraits; to recover some sense of how they functioned
socially we must look first at how museological interests have
affected the visibility and meaning of portrait-objects.
A recent exhibition at the Queen's Gallery, London,5
offered all too tangible evidence of the shift in the consumption of miniatures from integrated object to museological
exhibit. The vast majority of the royal miniatures on display
had been reframed by Queen Victoria in uniform gold
frames. An old photograph shows how the miniatures used to
be displayed in the queen's audience chamber, behind glass,
between the wood paneling and a line of full-scale portraits
(Fig. 3). The transformation of miniature from private
possession to museum piece began in the seventeenth century when the miniature emerged from the "privacy of the
closet into the semi-public world of the collector's cabinet."6
The impact of the public exhibition on the miniature painter's art after the foundation of the Royal Academy in 1768 has
never been thoroughly investigated, but it must have affected
both the dimensions of miniatures and the way they were
executed.7 Miniature painters (among whom were many
women) played a significant, if unacknowledged, role in the
development of public exhibitions in this period. And exhibiting practices extended into domestic spaces. Testimonies to
these practices can be found, as, for example, in the nineteenth-century photographs in Lord Ronald Gower's account
of Castle Howard (1881) that show a set of miniatures
attributed to Isaac Oliver in uniform plain gold cases, with
loops as if for a locket, but arranged with a metal scroll
bearing the sitter's name at the foot of each image.8 Arrangements such as this could narrate dynastic relations and, in
terms both of visuality and of function, may be understood as
a continuation of the Renaissance and seventeenth-century
practice of accumulating medals and creating imagistic family
trees.
It is hard to say just how far the reframing of miniatures in
order to emphasize the image was governed by the inconvenience of their original cases, which were designed as jewelry
(in the generic sense of work in precious stones with mountings), or by the desire to assimilate complex objects into an
ordered system determined by aesthetic values that privilege
MINIATURE
1 Bilston of London and Birmingham(?), enameled ceramic
with a portrait of Queen Charlotte, after a mezzotint engraving
by William Pether, 1762, after a painting by Thomas Frye.
Edinburgh, National Museums of Scotland, A 1953.489
art over technology.9 As an artifact whose construction requires particular skills, precious materials, and technological
know-how, the case enters into discourse at many points, as,
for example, when Goldsmith's Hall included a reference to
the hinges of lockets in the 1738-39 statute governing the
quality of gold used in a small number of jewelry items.10
Once mounted, what is essentially a private object (a smallscale portrait) enters social and economic exchange systems,
thereby participating in, and contributing to, public life.
Examples of miniatures in their original cases survive from
the seventeenth century, such as objects preserved intact in
royal treasuries (Fig. 4), but in many instances the desire to
achieve the kind of coherence of display that we see at
Windsor Castle has resulted in the disaggregation of the
composite artifact.
As spending on luxury goods extended to Europe's "middling sort," the collecting of miniature portraits expressly for
display proved one way of establishing a visual family tree with
modest expenditure and without encumbering the limited
spaces of urban homes. Moreover, a head-and-shoulders view
might be understood to provide the essence, omitting details
of dress, which would rapidly go out of fashion, thus ensuring
that one generation would not discard the images of its
progenitors.1- As Goethe, writing in 1799, succinctly puts it:
This format [little oil portraits on copper] has its own
advantages. A life-size portrait, even if it is only a head or a
half-length, always takes up more room than its intrinsic
PORTRAITS
IN EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY
ENGLAND
49
2 Bilston of London and Birmingham(?), enameled ceramic
with a portrait of King George III, after a mezzotint engraving by
William Pether, 1762, after a painting by Thomas Frye.
Edinburgh, National Museums of Scotland, A 1953.489
3 Windsor Castle, the queen's audience room, 1951, showing
miniatures in wall-mounted panels as arranged for Queen
Victoria and Prince Albert in 1860-61 (photo: Country Life
Picture Library)
interest demands. Every well-off man of sensibility should
have portraits of himself and his family at various stages of
his life. Strongly characterized by a clever artist and on a
50
ART BULLETIN
MARCH 2001 VOLUME LXXXIII
NUMBER
1
4 Alexander Cooper, miniatures of
Frederick III and Sophie Amalie, 1655,
in gold enamel lockets by Paul
Kurtz(?), 1656. Copenhagen,
Rosenborg Castle, Danske Kongers
Kronologiske Samling
small scale, they would take up little room, and thus he
could collect all his friends around him, and his posterity
would always find a place for such a gathering. A large
portrait, on the other hand, is only too apt to vanish with its
subject, and give way to heirs. And the fashions change so
much that one's grandmother, no matter how well she be
painted, is hardly at home among the carpets, furniture
and decor of her descendents.12
By the second half of the eighteenth century miniature
portraits, whether freestanding images or incorporated into
objects, had become part of the fashionable interior. It is well
known that Queen Charlotte's fine collection of precious
watches and miniatures was displayed in her dressing room. A
contemporary describes the queen's apartments at Buckingham House:
The Queen's apartments are ornamented, as one expects a
Queen's should be, with curiosities from every nation that
can deserve her notice. The most capital pictures, the
finest Dresden and other china, cabinets of more minute
curiosities. Among the pictures let me note the famed
cartoons [by Raphael] from Hampton Court, and a number of small and beautiful pictures; one room panell'd with
the finest Japan. The floors are all inlaid in a most
expensive manner, and, 'tho but in March, every room was
full of roses, carnations, hyacinths, &c., dispersed in the
prettiest manner imaginable in jars and different flowerpots on stands. On her toilet, besides the gilt plate,
innumerable knick-knacks. Round the dressing-room,let into
the crimsondamask hangings in a manner uncommonlyelegant,
areframes offine impressions[that is, of intaglios], miniatures,
cc. &C.13
Queen Charlotte was admired for her taste in keeping her
palace warm in winter and for surrounding herself with
elegant artifacts, but Rev. William Mason's disparaging remark that the queen put her miniatures under "shop glass"
(rather than having them available for manual examination)
also indicates that this kind of display was contentious.14 Even
while portrait miniatures were annexed for purposes of
domestic decor they continued to be acquired, given, received, and circulated as objects. The queen and other
MINIATURE
PORTRAITS
5 F. Bartolozzi, engraving after Sir
William Beechey, Portraitof Her Majesty,
Patronessof Botany,and of theFine Arts,
London, 1799 (copyright ? The British
Museum, London, M.M. 15-150)
women of quality are known to have worn miniatures of their
husbands; these were not hidden but placed facing outward as
part of their apparel. Such ambulant portraits were reinscribed in large-scale portraiture, suggesting allegiance both
to fashion and to a spouse who had almost total legal rights
over a wife's person but, equally, considerable financial
obligation, since under marriage law he was liable for her
debts.15 The miniature portrait, either worn as part of a
parure (Figs. 5, 6), hung from a ribbon, or mounted on a
pearl bracelet, was a commonplace of mid-eighteenth-century
female portraiture. The bond between David Garrick and his
wife in Hogarth's portrait of 1757 (Figs. 7, 8) is emphasized
through this device, and when in 1755 Mrs. Cibber was
represented by Pieter van Bleeck in the role of Cordelia (Figs.
6 Detail of Fig. 5
ENGLAND
51
52
ART BULLETIN
NUMBER
1
7 William Hogarth, David Garrickand
His Wife,oil on canvas, 1757. The Royal
Collection (? 2000 Her Majesty Queen
Elizabeth II, photo: Hamilton Kerr
Institute, Cambridge)
9, 10) audiences would have immediately noticed the male
portrait hanging from a ribbon on her corsage, lending
added pathos to the narrative of her abandonment. Equally,
viewers of Hogarth's The Lady's Last Stake, exhibited at the
Society of Artists in 1761, would have understood all too well
the predicament of a woman who had unwisely gambled
herself into a corner from which she could extricate herself
only by the loss of chastity, for among the jewels she has
wagered and lost and which now lie in her card partner's hat
is a pearl bracelet on which is mounted her husband's portrait
8 Detail of Fig. 7
(Figs. 11, 12).16
The giving, receiving, and wearing of portrait miniatures as
part of fashionable social practice is, as we have seen, one
aspect of the luxury Archenholz identifies with England. Two
characteristics of the development of miniatures in the
eighteenth century are attributable to these fashionable
rituals: the reduction in size of miniatures during the period
up to the 1760s and the replacement of vellum with ivory after
1707, leading to the kind of refinement that reached its
MINIATURE
PORTRAITS
ENGLAND
53
9 Pieter van Bleeck, Mrs. Cibberas
Cordeliain Nahum Tate'sVersionof King
Lear,1755. New Haven, Yale Center for
British Art, Paul Mellon Collection
popular apogee in Richard Cosway's miniatures of the 1780s
(Fig. 13).17 Although miniaturists initially found it much
more difficult to achieve the same degree of artistic mastery
with ivory, the material was more consonant with the idea of
preciousjeweler's work than vellum, which had been used not
only for illumination but also for all forms of documentation
since the Middle Ages. The small size of miniatures in this
period (known as "the modest school")18 possibly signals
their subordination to the totality of the artifact. Thus,
provided a miniature was small enough, it could be mounted
on a box, a watchcase, a locket, or any other object without
disrupting the design of the container in which it was
mounted. However, if we look at usage, we find that ostentation rather than modesty appears to govern the culture of
miniatures. One contemporary writer suggests how a fashion
for the wearing of miniatures was established when the
duchess of Kingston was presented at court in 1769. While
George III and Queen Charlotte, as well as all the great
officers of state, honored Her Grace by wearing her favors, the
duchess "wore pendent [sic] on her left shoulder, the picture
of the Electress of Saxony." Following her example, we are
told, "other ladies began to wear miniature portraits in the
same manner."19 This marks an extension of the wearing of a
miniature as a mark of private loyalty (whether to husband or
father) that I have earlier described.
While courtiers were deploying miniatures for diplomatic
purposes, and wives displayed images of male kin, wearing
miniatures entered popular discourse as a topos of affective
private engagement. Thus, Louisa Connolly declared to her
dearest sister, "you have no notion ... how happy I am to have
so sweet a picture of you as I have to wear constantly; it's the
greatest pleasure almost I have, to look at it so constantly as I
do."20 We will leave aside for a moment the apparent
contradiction between wearing something and looking at it
10 Detail of Fig. 9
54
ART BULLETIN
NUMBER
1
11 Hogarth, Piquet,or Virtuein Danger
(The Lady'sLast Stake),oil on canvas,
1759. Buffalo. N.Y.,Albright-Knox Art
Gallery, Gift of Seymour H. Knox, 1945
Artists of Great Britain] has done for all the branches of
painting together, because by wearing bracelets, they have
at once promoted the art and rewarded the labour of the
artist.21
12 Detail of Fig. 11
and simply remark how notions of constancy and perpetuity
along with superlatives of affection cluster around the description of what is evidently a miniature as jewelry. The fashion
for lockets and bracelets containing portraits (Figs. 14, 15)
was so well established by 1766 thatJohn Gwynn was able to
propose that:
The Ladies of Great Britain have done infinitely more for
the professors of miniature painting, than the Society [of
The conjunction of portrait miniature and jeweled container located the portrait ineradicably in the domain of
luxury, and hence also of commerce. As Alison Conway has
pointed out, while the husband of Henry Fielding's eponymous heroine Amelia identifies the worth of her miniature as
residing in the painting, not in the jewels, the fact that her
portrait "set in Gold, with three little Diamonds" can be
stolen by an admirer and then pawned by the heroine in
order to buy food for her family positions it as the mechanism
at the center of the novel's moral ambiguities. Selling the
portrait takes the place of selling her body, but the exchange
nonetheless links sentimentalism to a material eroticism.22
The deployment of a portrait artifact in this fiction was
intended to appeal to readers who, whether or not they
articulated it in so many words, understood that social
relations are constituted by gift giving and that the slippage
between commodity and gift is one that provides the measure
of a distinction between, in Nicholas Thomas's words, what
has rank and what has price.23
These contradictions between the transcendent and the
material are reiterated at the economic level in anxieties over
the debasement of portrait painting through the appearance
of portraits in the parlors of tradesmen and the promiscuous
wearing of miniatures, as articulated in William Combe's
Epistle to Reynolds in 1777. In the 1740s, a miniaturist like
Christian Friedrich Zincke entertained the nobility, and a visit
to his studio was part of a social round that might start with
MINIATURE
PORTRAITS
(
?,./
ENGLAND
55
'IZ
?
sR;?lt
14 Jeremiah Meyer, portrait, mounted in a 19th-century gold
frame on a woven-hair bracelet (from sale cat. Christie's,
London, Nov. 7, 1988, lot 135)
13 Richard Cosway WarrenHastings,watercolor on enamel in
locket set with paste diamonds, 1787(?). London, the National
Portrait Gallery
breakfast (at lunchtime) and conclude with a visit to Vauxhall.24 By the 1770s anyone who possessed the means could
acquire what had once been a mark of distinction. Combe
refers contemptuously to "many a good Woman, whose arms
are marked with an eternal red, from the industry of less
prosperous days, [who] considers the Bracelet, with the
Miniature-Painting, as an ornament necessary to her Station
in Life."25 The scandalous nature of this narrative derives not
simply from the impropriety of nouveau riche dressing.
Jewelry, bequeathed as heirloom or as gift, carries narratives
of continuity and signifies the transvaluation of the material
into abstract qualities such as history or spirituality. An
extreme example might be jewelry containing portraits of
Charles I and Charles II and sometimes also locks of their
hair; these artifacts are quasi-reliquaries, linking a moment of
the past to the present of the consumer (Fig. 16).26 By
contrast, Combe's "many a good Woman" displays a body
that evinces labor; her marked and imperfect arms are the
focus of historical narrative, while herjewelry (it is implied) is
new.
Eighteenth-century miniaturists were part of an industry of
copyists who provided full-scale replicas for a range of
residences and official sites or reduced life-size portraits to
handy pocket-size miniatures.27 They therefore located themselves where they might best pick up commissions. One such
place was Rome, where a concentration of wealth, leisure, and
sociability ensured good business and where readily portable
miniatures were in demand. On the other hand, materials for
producing these works might need to be transported from
home. A letter fro-n Alexander Day, resident in Rome in the
15 George Engleheart, portrait, mounted in a 19th-century
gold frame on a woven-hair bracelet (from sale cat., Christie's,
London, Nov. 7, 1988, lot 135)
16 Gold ring with a transverse
oval bezel set with a
contemporary miniature of
Charles I under crystal, English,
18th century. London, Victoria
and Albert Museum (photo: V&A
Picture Library,London,
M.I-1909)
t
1780s, to Prince Hoare reveals some of the circumstances of
such itinerant workers:
I have taken the liberty to send you two of my miniatures by
Mr. Byers [James Byers, 1733-1817] in puting [sic] one of
them into the case I had the misfortune to break the crystal
56
ART BULLETIN
NUMBER
1
17 Nathanial Dance, OliveCraster,oil on
canvas, 1762. Private collection (photo:
Laing Art Gallery, Newcastle-upon-Tyne)
which if you will get it replaced you will do me a particular
favour they are intended for your friend Mr. Yorke to
whom if you will get them delivered for me you will greatly
oblige me, I shall be much obliged also for your opinion of
them. I wrote some time ago to Mr. Humphrey [Ozias
Humphrey, 1742-1810] requesting the favour of him to
send me some Ivory which I apprehend he has forgot .. .28
From the point of view of patrons, Rome provided opportunities to secure representations that could be taken home
both as mementos and as material wealth. George and Olive
Craster, Northumbrian gentry, traveled to Rome in 1761
following their marriage; they sat to Pompeo Batoni and
Nathanial Dance (Fig. 17), whose portraits were then immediately reproduced as replicas in miniature by Tibaldi. George
and Olive Craster were keen shoppers and kept careful
accounts, listing both full-size portraits and miniatures as
separate items at the end of a list that includes "setting
Menervas head in a ring," "a Cornelian Socrates's head," "a
box of wax to take impressions," "6 sonatas, & 7 airs copy'd,"
and "a fan of the view [of] St Peters."29 It is a misrepresentation to suggest that replicas such as these were "spiritless
affairs."30 For consumers, an image introduced into a container made of precious materials fused economic and senti-
mental value; the worth of the subject was irrevocably endorsed by the precious materials, producing at the symbolic
level a sign of unique distinction.31
The process of manufacture involved having the client
supply the image to the jeweler either independently or
through the agency of the artist. Thus, for example, Nathanial
Hone, whose studio equipment included all the requirements
for this sort of business (mahogany traveling easel and chair
and convex looking glasses), lists in his account book on May
4, 1752, "Setting for Duchess of Hamilton in her box a
porphyry stone 1 gn," indicating that he was responsible not
only for the painting but also for organizing its mounting,32
while the earl of Charlemont's agent in Paris in 1754 (where
he was negotiating with the sought-after Franqois-Guillaume
Tiron over a commission for an ornamented box) tells his
employer that the goldsmith and jeweler "insists upon ...
having the miniature in his hands before he begins to work,
that he may take exactly the size, the thickness etc." He adds
that the jeweler "assures me it runs no manner of risk, and
that he is continually trusted with very valuable paintings by
the court."33
Through his ingenuity and his business acumen, the
craftsman (for whom the image is merely part of the materials
PORTRAITS
MINIATURE
with which he works) produces an artifact in which the
container in every sense surpasses the value of the image. "I
am making a rich gold Snuff Box to contain the Duke [of
Northumberland]'s picture surrounded with Brilliants all
which I owe to your kind recommendation," writesJames Fog
in 1772 to SirJohn Delaval.34 Likewise, when Earl Tyrconnel
had Rundell, Bridge, and Rundell, the royal goldsmiths,
undertake a series of repairs, settings, and resettings for
himself and his family in 1803, the job included setting his
Lordship's miniature in a locket with fine pearls, an opal, and
an "elegant hair device" at the back (Fig. 18).35 There is no
mention in these instances of the authorship or value of the
portraits; it is jewels that define the character of the object.
"Brilliant" is the descriptor for a faceted diamond that had
spectacular refractive qualities as devised in the late seventeenth century. These were the first diamonds that possessed
the characteristic glitter with which the stones are associated
in the modern world. The technological discoveries that led
to the brilliant cutting of diamonds, as well as the opening up
of diamond mines in Brazil, ensured that by the 1760s
diamonds were not only very fashionable but also widely
available.36 It is not surprising, therefore, that the testaments
of women writing their wills in the first half of the century
suggest that, while authorship and quality of execution in
miniature painting (or, indeed, in goldsmithing) may have
been of little account, the combination of portrait subject and
precious stones formed in usage a synthetic cipher for
memory. Thus, such articles are typically described generically simply as "the picture of my late husband set with
diamonds."37
I have suggested briefly the relationship of miniatures to
the social economy of portraiture in eighteenth-century
England, I have signaled something of the difficulties in
assessing their significance as objects of consumption, I have
indicated that they function as affective, and I have drawn
attention to the implicit relationship of artifact to body by
reference both to the construction of miniature portraits in
their containers and to the discourses that they engendered.
So how are we to approach a genre of artwork that exists on an
axis between portrait painting and the pawnshop, between
the Royal Academy and the treasure hoard, between the body
and the vitrine? The relationship of portraiture to the idea of
gift economies is well established in the annals of Western art.
We think, for example, of Erasmus and Peter Gillis having
their portraits painted on the same panel by Quentin Matsys
explicitly as a gift for Sir Thomas More, to whom Erasmus
wrote on September 8, 1517:
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ENGLAND
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18 Invoice of goods purchased by the Right Hon. Earl
Tyrconnel from Rundell, Bridge, and Rundell, goldsmiths and
jewellers to Their Majesties, London, Nov. 4, 1803, to May 11,
1804. Oxford, Bodleian Library,msJohnJohnson Collection,
Bill Headings box 8
I am sending you the portraits, so that we may remain
always close to you, even if some misfortune separates us.
One half has been paid for by Petrus, the other by myself;
not that each of us would not willingly have paid the whole.
But we wanted to offer you a joint gift.38
secular and bourgeois society, portraits work actually and
metaphorically to secure a connection between an absent
person and the viewer. Moreover, as Erasmus's careful reference to payment indicates, they provide for the translation of
economic value into transcendent worth: the financial cooperation is an analogue to the partnership imaged on the
panel. Taken together, these two things guarantee the symbiotic and reciprocative nature of this particular friendship.
This kind of highly invested gift of the portrait remains a not
uncommon process in eighteenth-century England; the wills
of women of substance-and women tended to control both
extensive evidence
family portraits and personaljewels-offer
are
orchestrated as a
of
of the ways in which gifts
portraits
measure of control, an exercise that ultimately takes place
from beyond the grave. Thus, for example, the "bluestocking" Lady Catherine Jones opened a list of instructions
about her property with the declaration:
Portrait gifts, we may infer, not only represent people, they
also stand in their stead; as anthropologists have long recognized, gifts are part of a legal system of obligation, and, as
Marcel Mauss most famously puts it, "to make a gift of
something is to make a present of some part of oneself."39 In
I give and devise the picture of my dear ffriend [sic] Mrs
Kendall which stands over the door of my bedchamber to
Mrs Ann Muddiford now of Windsor if she shall be living at
the time of my decease and if she shall happen not to be
living at that time I give and devise the same to Mrs Old-
58
ART BULLETIN
NUMBER
1
gave way, probably around the mid-seventeenth century, to an
enamel portrait in a diamond-studded setting. Confusingly,
these were known as boites-d-portrait.45
By the early nineteenth
in
the
century
England,
gift of a tabatierehad become such a
standardized aspect of diplomatic exchange that it apparently
lost all meaning, and the boxes-with or without imageshad become tantamount to currency, which was immediately
traded in by the recipient for hard cash. George Fox, a
craftsman with the royal goldsmiths Rundell, Bridge, and
Rundell from 1806 to 1843, recalled that in the early years of
the nineteenth century the firm made considerable profits
out of official present giving, for
19 Designs for items including lockets, watchcases, and
tabatieres,fromJ. B. Herbst, A Bookof SeverallOrnaments,n.p.,
1708. Brussels, Bibliotheque Royale Albert Ier, Cabinet des
Estampes
field and her sister & likewise give and devise the picture of
Miss Squire deceased to Mrs Narcot her executrix.40
The portraits mentioned in Lady Catherine's will are full
scale. We; might, however, guess that portrait-objects that
could be both held and worn (making them ambulant) might
be even more suitable for the kind of bequest that marks
patterns of relations across time and generation. The issue of
where a full-scale portrait was, or would be, hung (an issue
that is pressing in some of the will writing) is not germane to
gifts of portrait-objects. On the other hand, the factor of
wearing and holding needs to be taken into account. In
particular, the portrait-object's smallness of dimensions made
it especially suitable for presentation even if, as Mark Jones
has rightly pointed out, the highly wrought tabatiere (snuffbox) made by George Michael Moser and presented by
George III to his mentor the earl of Bute was no more
intended for snuff taking than magnificent gold-hilted presentation swords were intended for use in battle. Destined for
display, such gifts were instrumental in political exchanges.41
Diplomatic gifts at the Hanoverian court comprised fashionable luxuries such as jewelry and china associated with the
vogue for drinking tea and coffee; the fine dividing line
between a gift and payment for services rendered is illustrated
when the duchess of Dorset and Lady Caroline Sackville were
presented in 1740 with a number of consumer items (gold
teapot, teakettle, lamp, Dresden china, diamond solitaire,
and, for the latter, "a gold snuff box with a thousand pounds
bank bill in it."42 The snuffbox, palm-size and crafted of
precious materials, was passed literally from hand to hand and
could outlive the occasion as a memento: it is, to quote Mary
Douglas, "the visible bit of the iceberg that is the whole social
process."43 The contents, on the other hand, revealed to the
recipient when she opened the lid, materially and sentimenmere piece of paper-but they
tally are worth nothing-a
stand for exchange value and thus for a material future.
The proliferation of engraved manuals of designs for
pendants, tabatieres, and sword hilts from the early seventeenth century onward (Fig. 19) is testimony to the widespread currency of such articles in political practice throughout European courts and institutions.44 In France, for example,
the locket containing a miniature as preferred courtly gift
it was the custom of those Palmy days for the minister who
received a diplomatic Present to return one of a somewhat
similar value ... to the Minister who made him the Present
and in consequence of this good old custom RBR sent in
an account of twenty two snuff boxes of the value of One
thousand guineas each which they had finished in consequence of the Congress of Vienna.46
Questions were raised in the House of Commons, it is
claimed, byJoseph Hume about this vast expenditure, but the
practice continued unabated up until the death of George IV.
As Fox establishes, many of these diplomatic snuffboxes were
quickly returned to the firm, which bought them back at
reduced cost, adapted them, and sold them again to the
original purchasers.47
Evidence for the honorific functions of portrait-objects as
part of eighteenth-century institutionalized giving, prior to
the explicit commercialization described above, is widespread
and indicates the significance of visuality-the
collective
of
the
as
field
a
of
acknowledgment
body
inscription-and
emulation. Thus, for example, when Prince Orloff was presented at court on October 25, 1775, it was noticed that he
wore the portrait of Empress Catherine, as "her Majesty's
adjutant," and that it was "set round with brilliants."48The
portrait-objects deployed in acts of secrecy at the court of
Elizabeth I, about which Patricia Fumerton has so cogently
written,49 had become, at the court of George III, highly
visible public currency in the conduct of social and political
relations. Visitors were honored with gifts of royal portraits
richly set in diamonds.50 Wedding gifts to Queen Charlotte
included the celebrated, and much discussed, ring worn on
the little finger of the queen's right hand at her marriage
ceremony containing a likeness of the king in miniature,
"done exquisitely beautiful for the coin" byJeremiah Meyer,51
who was appointed miniature painter to the queen and
enamel painter to the king in 1764. Meyer's association with
the court-which resulted in fine miniatures of the queen
(Fig. 20) and some of her children-had begun several years
earlier, when he produced the king's profile for the coinage.
He was also responsible for the image on the "pair of
bracelets"-one
of which is visible in several portraitsof
six
rows of picked pearls as large as a full pea;
"consisting
the clasps-one his picture, the other his hair and cipher,
both set round with diamonds" (Fig. 21) and many other
precious articles included in the wedding gift.52
After the king's retirement from public life due to his
unbalanced state of mind, the queen wore the king's portrait
MINIATURE
PORTRAITS
+Pn?'
L
ENGLAND
59
cV,
?
r
:?
C
i.
a
I
r
C r
d?4'
..
iP(
..
c-3.
,?I
c.r
-?
..
r
I
LL
?r
Cc i*
r
-;i
,,
r,
_II
I
i.
O?.
u r
20 Meyer, QueenCharlotte,watercolor on ivory, mid-1770s. The
Royal Collection (? 2000 Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II)
21 Meyer, miniature of George III, mounted on the clasp of a
pearl bracelet and surrounded by brilliant-cut diamonds, 1761.
The Royal Collection (? 2000 Her MajestyQueen Elizabeth II)
around her neck; she is represented thus in engraved images
from this period (Fig. 22). Witnessing her deportment in
1818, the American ambassador, Benjamin Rush, speaking as
a republican, specifically makes the point that the portrait as
worn by the queen during the absence of the mad king,
"scathed by the hand of Heaven," affirms her status as wife
and mother, "eclipsing the artificial glory of Queen."53 These
images of George III and Queen Charlotte can be seen,
therefore, to belong within two discourses of public circulation. On the one hand, the miniature of the king was
connected to the coinage and thence to the idea of substitution and exchange value. On the other hand, royal miniatures
enter the field of reproductive engraving and are thus part of
the mass circulation of portrait and caricature images. The
distinctive medium and genre of the engraved portrait is
conceptually linked to the portrait-object. Thus, if we glance
for a moment at the Baroque tradition of engraved royal
portraits with their elaborate ornamented surrounds-a tradition revived at the time of the royal wedding in 1761 (Fig.
23)-we see a further authorization for the interactive relationship between portrait image and richly ornamented container as part of elite social ritual.
Let us pause for a moment over Queen Charlotte's weddinggift bracelet (Fig. 21). Several interlocking semiotic systems
are at work here. The portrait circumscribes the subject: in
showing usually only the head and shoulders in an oval or a
roundel, the miniature constitutes a reduction both in dimensions (from life-size to miniature) and from the whole body to
a part. Following Susan Stewart, we might observe that the
minute depiction of the object in painting "reduces the
tactile ... dimensions of the object and at the same time
increases the significance of the object within the system of
signs."54 In other words, diminution of dimension serves to
shift the signifying practice from the mimetic to the symbolic
register. For Stewart, the multum in parvo offers "a kind of
univocality, a form of absolute closure; its function is to close
down discourse and not to open the wounds of its inadequacies."55 Like the epigram, the subject of Stewart's observation,
the miniature is a piece of discourse that, abstracted from the
context in hand, transcends its origins. Miniaturization must
be endorsed by containment (closure) in a glittering world of
illusion if these portrait-objects are to affirm the body's power
rather than, in uncanny fashion, disrupt the integrity of the
subject as bearer. But-and here I depart from Stewart-the
miniatures under consideration are three-dimensional objects; the container for the image thus reintroduces a tactility
and an explicit preciousness that is germane to the registering
of the portrait-object as souvenir. I will return later to this
question, with the specific instance of MajorJohn Andre. For
the present, let me draw attention to the fact that the
condition of the miniature as portrait-object is gendered;
women might publicly display on their persons men's images,
but men might not act reciprocally without loss of masculinity.
Men owned and cherished but did not normally publicly
display portrait miniatures. Indeed, the wearing of a miniature was, it would seem, precisely a site for the inscription of
sexual difference. Accordingly, the wearing of a miniature
of oneself was a feminizing and solipsistic act, a form of
unacceptable and transgressive narcissism. In a celebrated
episode in Vauxhall Gardens at this period a macaroni who
60
ART BULLETIN
MARCH 2001 VOLUME
LXXXIII
NUMBER 1
"':,
/ /I /,, ,'';
''.
,
provoked a serious dispute with a clergyman that resulted in a
sustained public dialogue was advised to appear "only in
petticoats at Vauxhall for the remainder of the season, as the
most likely method of escaping the chastisement due for his
late unmanly and senseless conduct." Thus, "the pretty
creature (his snow-white bosom decorated with the miniature
resemblance of his own sweet person) may then tread in
perfect security... ."56
Queen Charlotte's bracelets incorporated the royal cipher
(seen also on bracelets presented by George III in 1794 to the
wife of Admiral Howe57) and the king's hair. The cipher
operates in a world of public signs; it acts as semiotic
guarantee to the identity of the subject represented in the
iconic field. So what of the hair that was visible and palpably
different in kind from painted ivory or cut gemstone? The
ability to paint hair effectively is one of the yardsticks by which
the successful miniaturist is judged.58 Yet what is so striking
about portrait-objects that typically incorporate hair, such as
an English mourning ring of 1786 (Fig. 24), is how the
presence of body substance asserts a difference of scale and
material that serves to isolate the cipher or the miniature,
thrusting it further into a world of inorganic illusion while
22 Henry Meyer, engraving after
Jeremiah Meyer(?), 1767, Her Majesty
QueenCharlotte ETATXXIII,London,
1818. London, the British Museum
(photo: copyright o The British
Museum, 1864-1-14-253)
emphasizing the scale of the human to which the hair
belongs. This particular example has a vesicle-shaped bezel
set with a glass enclosing plaited hair of two children, over
which are worked, partly in seed pearls, the initials SWH and
willow leaves. It is inscribed on the back "SARAH
HETHERINGTON
OB: 7 APR. 1786 ET 7 MSWM HETHERINGTON OB 31 JULY 1786 AET 8
yRS 9 MS." Gemstones, which combined with hair to
provide a
further element in the equation, are for their part highly
invested as part of the geological world of marvels traditionally found in the kunstkammerIn this period they became the
object of much fascination as new sources were discovered
and as experiments took place to establish the relative
durability of different kinds of gemstones.59 The similarity of
miniature portrait images encased in wonderful materials to
sacramental artifacts and reliquaries should not go unnoticed. Protestants in this period were both fascinated and
repelled by relics they saw on their travels yet thought nothing
of imprisoning locks of hair in an artifact that would be worn
as a kind of talisman. Like reliquaries, miniatures brought
together diverse natural materials in a wonderful and ingenious work of artifice that was dazzling and reverential at one
and the same time.
MINIATURE
23 John Elias Nilson, CharlottaMagn:
Britan:Franc:et Hibern:Regina,
engraving, 1761. London, the British
Museum (photo: copyright ? The
British Museum, London, 1895-6-17187)
Reliquaries commonly encase-sometimes
offering to view
behind crystal or glass-a body part or material fragment that
stands as surrogate for a presence at once mystical and
phenomenological. Portrait images as such have little or no
place in reliquaries. Yet there is evidence for a congruence
between the mode of operation of the reliquary and that of
the portrait-object. In Protestant cultures, perhaps precisely
on account of the elimination of official shrines, the secular
reliquary functioned in devotional ways that are selfconsciously analogous to religious reliquaries. Portraits and
hair were commonly given equal importance in such constructions, which included hidden elements, secret compartments,
and "windows." Moreover, the terminology of relics was
employed to describe them,60 and the way in which they were
configured demanded a viewing process analogous to that of
religious relics. Take, for example, a small box made in
Dresden about 1775 of cornelian inlaid with gold (now in the
PORTRAITS
ENGLAND
61
CHARLOTTA
Magn: Britn:Fran: c: cetIlibtrn:Regmna
_,?
(?' e
',
?a
~./*4e.
:@?teqalo,
n.,hrf^ i^)1.. C, $1l1.1 i'r4+
:
.
Wallace Collection). The box contains a secret slide, which,
when drawn out, reveals the portraits of Voltaire (on one side)
and of his mistress, Emilie, marquise du Chatelet (on the
other), painted on ivory (Fig. 25). As with a reliquary, it
invites contemplation of the aesthetic and material value of a
rich exterior while concealing the representation of something that is beyond price (the relationship between two
people).
Miniature portraits and figurative scenes in brooches and
lockets with locks of hair mounted on the reverse side are so
common in Europe in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, whether as mourning jewelry or tokens of
affection, that it is easy to overlook how highly invested they
were as artifacts in actual social relations and in representation. It is, therefore, worth quoting in full a description of the
manufacture, materials, and purpose of one such piece, a
description that dwells on emblems, mysterious insignia,
62
ART BULLETIN
NUMBER 1
24 Gold mourning ring enclosing plaited hair over which are
worked in seed pearls willow leaves and the initials of Sarah and
William Hetherington, English, 1786. London, Victoria and
Albert Museum (photo: V&A Picture Library,London, 8641888)
religious imagery, precious substances, and the replication of
body shapes. Here, in Georgiana Cavendish's novel The Sylph,
which reached its third edition in 1783, the heroine organizes
a gift for an admirer:
This morning I dispatched to Anderton's Coffee-house the
most elegant locket of hair that you ever saw. May I be
permitted to say thus much, when the design was all my
own? ... The locket is in the form and size of that bracelet
I sent you; the device an altar, on which is inscribed these
words, 'To Gratitude', an elegant figure of a woman
making an offering on her knees, and a winged cherub
bearing the incense to heaven. A narrow plait of hair,
about the breadth of penny ribbon, is fastened on each
side of the locket, near the top, by three diamonds, and
united with a bow of diamonds, by which it may hang to a
ribbon. I assure you, it is exceedingly pretty... I forgot to
tell you, as the hair was taken from my head by your dear
hand before I married, I took the fancy of putting the
initials I.G. Julia Grenville] instead of I.S. [Julia Stanley].
It was a whim that seized me, because the hair never did
belong
to I.S.61
Julia Grenville's locket employs commonplace
iconogra-
phy, but the hair that serves as signature or portrait-as a
representation of herself-is singularly her own and is understood as such long before genetics began to play a part in
constructions of identity. Meditating on the seventeenthcentury "Baroque place," Orest Ranum has drawn attention
to the need to recuperate the pre-Wolfflinian thrill of curiosity
around the singular object, and to the ways in which religious
connotations constituted a forbidden site of pleasure for the
beholder.62 I wish, accordingly, to reiterate that portraitobjects share something of this fascinating singularity, and
that this distinguishes them from full-scale portraits despite
the fact that they may belong to the same commodity system.
As Igor Kopytoff, in a pioneering examination of the biography of things, points out, "there is clearly a yearning for
singularization in complex societies."63 According to his
account we could, by inference, conclude that the "objectness" of miniatures and their multum in parvo effect are
explicable by reference to this need for an ever greater
singularization, a process that, in reducing full-scale portraits
in frames to miniature portraits in jeweled containers, would
be analogous to the miniaturization of the book, so vividly
described by Susan Stewart.64 This, however, fails to address
the questions of reflexivity and of touch: the mise-en-abymeof
the miniature of the king represented at the heart of the
portrait of Queen Charlotte (Fig. 22), the proximity of
the portrait-object to the body as worn and represented, the
assimilation of body structures into the forms in which
portrait-objects are devised, and the significance of the
portrait-object as a gift constituted by the moment of transference from one site to another, a moment that subjects it to the
principle of exchange.
The concept of mise-en-abyme,as an imagistic rhetorical
device, derives from a passage in Andre Gide's journal in
which he describes his intentions in the TentativeAmoureuseby
invoking (in the end inconclusively) the trope of convex
mirrors introduced into pictorial representations (as in Jan
van Eyck's Arnolfini portrait) and, ultimately, the heraldic
device "that consists in setting in the escutcheon a smaller
one 'en abyme'at the heart point."65 This complex and elusive
self-referential formulation-as well as the significance of the
been minutely
trope for twentieth-century literature-has
analyzed by Lucien Dallenbach, who concludes that "a 'mise
en abyme' is any aspect enclosed within a work that shows a
similarity with the work that contains it."66 The miniature
the convex mirrors in paintings-does
not
replica-unlike
partially reflect the surroundings but rather offers an accurate reflection of the subject of the work itself-that is, it acts
as a commentary on the work, bringing out its form and
meaning. Dallenbach's exploitation of this phenomenon is
confined to acts of writing. But it is possible to argue for a
visual dimension, drawing on his identification of the interdependency between image and mise-enabyme.As well as requiring a "diachronic constraint" in opposition to the simultaneity of a mirror image, the work that contains the mise-en-abyme
must itself "point up the reflexion that is taking place; or,
more precisely, the reflexion must become the subject of the
reflexion."67 To return to the image of George III worn, as
Benjamin Rush noticed, by Queen Charlotte (Fig. 22), we can
observe the conditions of the mise-en-abymeat work. The
miniature as worn eclipses the queen's artificial glory by
MINIATURE
PORTRAITS
ENGLAND
63
25 Oval box, cornelian inlaid with
gold, Dresden, ca. 1775, containing a
secret slide on which is mounted on
one side a portrait of Voltaire and on
the other a portrait of Emilie, marquise
du Chatelet, in watercolor on ivory.
London, the Wallace Collection
reinstating her as part of the king's body-as wife and mother,
to use Rush's words. In representation, the mise-en-abymeis
formally constituted by the image of the king re-presented
within the image of the queen; at the heart of the queen's
image is the king's portrait, serving to make sense of the
image and guaranteeing royal power despite the known frailty
of the king as individual and the growing domestication of the
monarchy.68 The portrait image as mise-en-abymeis thus a
rhetorical device that provides a modern and apposite reassertion of the theory of the king's two bodies.69
We have now reached a point where it is possible to see how
miniatures are historically, quintessentially, about the oscillation between self and other. They stage a linkage between the
subject and an other and generate, in eighteenth-century
England, a mass of affective imagery narrating contemplative
moments, often with erotic implications, in which solitary
young men and women gaze at miniatures. The word gaze in
this period denotes a fixity of looking or staring that implies a
degree of self-consciousness on the part of the looker and the
looked at. Miniatures in which the eye and its immediate
surround, together with a lock of hair, stand metonymically
for the whole face of the looked at are devices within, and
further material evidence of, the game of fixed and selfconscious looking.70 The gaze is, in other words, a socialized
manner of seeing.71 It is also a mode of looking that is
associated with the kind of artifact under discussion here, an
object that involved the use of convex lenses in its production
and that required viewers to focus intently if they were to
grasp its import. Thus, in The Sylph,Julia Grenville's father
recounts how, when he was courting her mother and was
about to be sent abroad with his regiment, she gave him "her
picture in a locket, and on the reverse a device with her hair;
this was an inestimable present to me.-It was my sole employ,
while off duty, to gaze on the lovely resemblance of the fairest
of women."72 To possess, and to contemplate, an image of the
loved one here signals a private sensibility that complements
the masculine ideal of "duty." Portrait-objects as gazed at by
women in representations in the second half of the eighteenth century (Figs. 26, 27) are interchangeable with mirrors and letters, playing on the idea of love as a recognition of
the subject's ego in the other. The implied distance between
the individual who gazes and the held object gazed at is
essential to the maintenance of this narrative. In Lacanian
and gazed at-stages the
terms the miniature-hand-held
oscillation
between
affirmative
self-recognition
compelling
and the frustration of the disunified body.
Portrait-objects are distinguished not only by the requirement that they be gazed at but also by the necessity that they
be held. We need to ask therefore how touch is registered,
either materially with regard to the object or graphically
within representational practice. With regard to the former,
we might cite the small enamel and gold "portrait box" made
by an anonymous goldsmith in London probably in the 1750s
and comprising four miniature portraits by Christian Friedrich Zincke of members of the "bluestocking" circle around
Mrs. Elizabeth Montagu and the duchess of Portland (Fig.
one of the outcomes of the portrait sitting
28)-perhaps
referred to earlier. On the cover we see Mrs. Mary Delany in a
russet dress over a white slip held with a string of pearls; on
the interior cover the duchess of Portland in a blue dress
trimmed with fur and wearing pearls; on the hinged base Mrs.
Elizabeth Montagu in black Tudor costume; and on the
interior base an unknown female sitter in a white dress with a
garland of flowers.73 The box itself has no obvious practical
function, while the portraits it supports, as a consequence of
being incorporated into an oval box structure, are rendered
peculiarly interdependent. Only by manipulating the box,
turning it over in one's hands, opening it and closing it do the
varied combinations of relationships between the images
reveal themselves, staging through analogue the close ties of
friendship, its intimacies, secrecies, revelations, and proximities, physical and emotional. The importance of tactility and
of body-object proximity is inflected, moreover, in the selfconscious design of such boxes-a matter of fashion and of
comfort. Writing in 1754 from Paris, the major center for
these exquisitely made small artifacts, Lord Charlemont's
agent was accordingly concerned with the relation between
object-design and the body: "I found in many of the best
shops many new oval boxes. They told me the public was now
64
ART BULLETIN
NUMBER 1
26 John Raphael Smith, engraving after Francis Wheatley,
ContemplatingthePicture,published Nov. 14, 1785 (photo:
courtesy of Sotheby's Ltd., London)
divided between them and the square ones, which are
certainly more troublesome in the pocket."74
The interplay that is possible between images attached to
objects that open and close also possesses considerable
potential for innuendo. When Augustus, elector of Saxony,
king of Poland, gave Peter the Great a gold box with a secret
spring, he ensured that it incorporated portraits of a mistress.
That on the cover showed the woman in rich and formal
dress, whereas the image that was revealed when the spring
was touched and the lid popped open showed the same
woman in "a state of voluptuous and passionate disorder."75
This kind of thrill was made possible by a technology skilled in
inventing springs and that produced gold hard enough to
make them work, also allowing, for example, the creation of a
faux montre(false watch) that surprises by revealing a portrait
rather than a timepiece. Walpole fully appreciated this quality
of tactile discovery when he explained to the earl of Buchan
in 1792 that he could not possibly hand over the Lennox
jewel76 to an artist for copying and engraving because "it is so
complex and intricate; it opens in so many places, and the
springs and hinges are so very small and delicate, that when I
do show it, which is very rarely indeed, I never let it go out of
my own hands."77
Verbal and visual narratives rhetorically instantiate the
paramount importance of this kind of physical engagement
with the object. Rev. Samuel Bishop, who wrote a series of
verses to accompany anniversary gifts to his wife, predicts his
wife's discovery when she receives into her hands the "orangebergamot snuffbox," containing her portrait mounted inside
27 Francis Wheatley, TheMiniature,pencil on paper (from sale
cat., Sotheby's, London, Mar.9, 1989, lot 41)
the lid, that he has had made to celebrate their wedding
anniversary:
An husband, as in duty bound,
Presents, what an admirer found;
(Pray start not, when you lift the lid!)
A portrait in a Snuff-Box hid:
Aye marry-and myself alone
Can boast th'original my own....
Our Boxes of more modish make,
From various sources value take;
An artist's name; an humourist's whim;
The curious hinge; the costly rim;
But all in this agree, they bear
No perfume, till we place it there;
While modest Orange here, augments
From its own store the richest scents;A miniature complete and true,
Of-why not speak at once?-of you!Whose manner, in each part you fill,
Makes pleasure's self, more pleasing still.....78
MINIATURE
PORTRAITS
ENGLAND
65
28 Gold and enamel box on which
are mounted portraits by Christian
Friedrich Zincke of members of the
bluestocking circle (from sale cat.,
Christie's, London, Mar. 8, 1995, lot
21)
The author and inventor of the surprise hides in a poetic
image, for the reader to discover, a portrait image of his wife,
itself described as hidden in a snuffbox; the portrait refers to
an original-which ambiguously indicates both his wife and a
full-scale portrait of her, both of which he owns. While
acknowledging the long history of the portrait-object as a
device in literary plots, I take this poem as an indication of
how games of socialized looking around miniatures had, by
the end of the eighteenth century, become germane to the
recognized ways in which members of polite society represented themselves.
Francis Wheatley's popular images show miniatures being
held in ways that are explicitly erotically charged (Figs. 26,
27). But the held miniature may also suggest in representation a more nuanced-if nonetheless sexualized and socialized-dynamic.
Pompeo Batoni's portrait of Sir Sampson
Gideon, later first Lord Eardley, in the company of an
unidentified man stages one such moment (Fig. 29).79 In this
grand tour portrait a dynamic is established in homosocial
space that incorporates female presence as sentimental discourse-through the modern miniature in its case, which is in
the process of being handed from one male subject to the
other-and as muse in the bust of Minerva on whose chest (as
mise-en-abyme)an image of Medusa is discernible. One hand of
the seated figure offers the miniature while the other holds a
letter that has been opened. The strong diagonal that runs
from the silk-lined corner of his coat to the beribboned pigtail
of his companion's wig determines, through its axis, that the
subject of miniature and letter are linked in narrative and that
both men are caught in this affective bond. The pleading
animal further lends a tension to the silent exchange. We
know little, alas, of the circumstances of this commission, and
it would be futile to speculate as to the allusions that this
structure may have been intended to invoke. Nonetheless, it
serves to illustrate the ways in which the tactile function of
portrait-objects enters affective discourse, and how miniatures are culturally related to, if not actually analogous to,
letter writing. The miniature may therefore stand as a kind of
66
ART BULLETIN
NUMBER 1
29 Pompeo Batoni, Sir SampsonGideon
and an UnidentifiedCompanion,oil on
canvas, 1767. Melbourne, National
Gallery of Victoria
autograph, a suggestion that is supported by evidence that
small portraits were, on occasions, used as substitutes for
letters of introduction.80
The symbiotic relationship of letters and portraits finds a
further illustration in Queen Charlotte's presentation of a
Christmas gift in 1779 to her elderly friend Mary Delany,
saying she hoped "Mrs Delany would look at that sometimes
and remember her." When opened, the present turned out to
be a toy.81 Toys copied, on a small scale, features of the real
world, just as miniatures at one level imitate full-scale portraits. The connections, however, are more complex, since
toys appear to have served the same functions in relation to
memory and projection as miniatures. Mrs. Delany found in
her parcel
a most beautiful pocket case, the outside white sattin
work'd with gold, and ornamentd with gold spangles; the
inside-but
it is impossible ... to describe it, it is so
elegant; it is lined with pink sattin, and contains a knife,
sizsars, pencle, rule, compas, bodkin, and more than I can
say; but it is all gold and mother of pearl. At one end there
was a little letter case that contained a letter directed to
Mrs. Delany, written in the Queen's own hand....82
in a little letter case-within the
Here the letter-discovered
pocket-sized case with its miniature objects worked in precious materials acts in lieu of the queen's portrait, underscoring the poetic relations between letters and portrait-objects
established in Wheatley's mass-circulation engravings and
MINIATURE
suggesting also an elision between a person's signature and
image, both of which have a mnemonic function. It is,
perhaps, not coincidental that these narrativesof the receiving, wearing, and holding of portrait-objectsseem to proliferate at precisely the moment when, as I have established,
miniatures were becoming detached from the body and
transformedinto exhibition pieces.
It was also a moment-in the second half of the eighteenth
century-of what we might call institutionalized separation:
the grand tour (leading to lengthy sojournsin Rome by young
aristocraticmen), military and naval campaigns, mercantile
expansionism, and emigration generated the conditions for
the production and circulation of portrait-objects.William
Hickey in 1781 sent his mistressto the fashionable miniaturist
Richard Coswaybefore setting off on an East India Company
posting,83while, according to his biographer,John Opie as a
young man of unrecognized talents was compelled to paint
his own likeness as a keepsake for the young woman to whom
he was engaged, having been offered the chance of a passage
to America and lacking the money to commission a miniature. "The result was so good," the story goes, "that a
gentleman ... offered him a guinea if he would paint him as
successfully."84As a consequence he gave up the American
scheme and took lessons from the miniaturistJohn Smart
(1741-1811).
The importance of keepsakes lay, as I have remarked, not
only in the image they offered of a loved one but also in the
fact that they were transportable.Such objects were endowed
discursivelywith well-nighmagical properties, endorsing their
proximity to relics. Emile Durkheim's notion of sacred contagion is helpful here; considering prohibitions and the marking of boundaries around sacred sites, Durkheim identifies
how, by a sort of contradiction, the sacred world appears
inclined by its very nature to spread into the same profane
world that it otherwise excludes. Sacredness possesses, in his
account, a certain transcience that permits it to be spread
even by indirect contact from one object to another.85A
particularlyspectacular example is the case of MajorAndre,
whose virtues and untimely death (he was executed as a spy
after being found behind enemy lines in the AmericanWarof
Independence) were memorialized by his friend Anna
Seward.86John Andre had met Seward and Honora Sneyd,
her intimate friend, at Buxton in 1769.87Possessing not only
"a pretty taste for the fine arts"but also "some proficiency in
poetry, music, and painting," he was able to produce his own
portrait on October 1, 1780, the day preceding his execution.88
More significantlyfor my purposes, he had early on either
himself painted, or had painted for him, a miniature of
Honora. It is to this he refers in a letter to Anna Seward of
November 1, 1769: "when an impertinent consciousness
whispers in my ear, that I am not of the right stuff for a
merchant, I draw my Honora's picture from my bosom, and
the sight of that dear talismanso inspiritsmy industry,that no
foil appears oppressive."89Andre was not destined to marry
Honora, whose father forbade the match. He joined the
British army and she married Richard Lovell Edgeworth and
died soon afterward. Whether or not Andre continued to
think of Honora is hard to tell; what is not in doubt, however,
is that he remained in the affections of his friend Anna
Seward. The official account of Andre's capture records only
PORTRAITS
ENGLAND
67
that a number of incriminating papers were found in his
boots. But, according to Anna Seward, whose Monody on the
Death of Major Andre, published in 1781, was said to be her
most popular poem after "Louisa,"90 Andre stated, "I have
been taken prisoner by the Americans, and stript of everything except the picture of Honora, which I concealed in my
mouth. Preserving that, I yet think myself fortunate."91 These
lines, allegedly written by Andre himself, license Seward's
poetic representation of an extraordinary staged series of
physical maneuvers through which the miniature of Honoralike a relic guarded by an anchorite-moves
from its position
to
its
owner's
heart
to
his
and
then into his
pressed
lips,
mouth:
To my sad heart each dawn has seen thee prest!
Each night has laid thee pillow'd on my breast!
Force shall not tear thee from thy faithful shrine;
Shade of my love! thou shalt be ever mine!
'Tis fixed!-these lips shall resolute inclose
The precious soother of my ceasless woes.
Like the communicant with the Host, or like the pilgrim who
embraces "the most sacred urns," rejoicing throughout his
life "at having received and held them,"92 Andre commits to
his mouth "the beauteous semblance of the form he loves"
and determines, ". .. should relentless violence invade / This
last retreat, by frantic fondness made,"93 to swallow the
miniature of Honora and so, like Brutus's wife, to end his life.
In attempting to explain the preeminence of portraitobjects and their role in sentimental and economic life in the
early modern period it would be reasonable at this point to
turn to the notion of the gift as articulated in anthropological
literature, where giving is understood as an act "that tends to
establish a relationship between the parties involved."94 It
might seem logical to offer here an explanation of readily
portable portrait-objects as exchangeable consumer artifacts
participating in the kind of gift economy described most
famously by Bronislaw Malinowski in Argonauts of the Western
Pacific (1922), explored at a more general level by Marcel
Mauss in The Gift (1950), and interrogated at a philosophical
level byJacques Derrida in Given Time (1992).95 And there is
no doubt that this structure, with its attention to the ways in
which giving entails obligations for the recipient and-in the
case of Derrida-to the implications of giving, receiving, and
owing as temporal concepts, offers possibilities for explaining, for example, the sheer numbers of such items in the
possession of one person. One thinks, for example, of
the duchess of Marlborough's prolific jewel inventories,
surely testifying to an exchange in which the gift represents
one element in a chain where reciprocation takes not only the
form of material objects presented in return but also the form
of respect, services performed, and, in Derridean terms, the
never-to-be-realized
obligation to respond.96 However,
the important characteristic of singularity that I identified in
the earlier part of this essay is hard to reconcile with
definitions of the gift as something that "keeps going," unlike
other forms of property "that stand still."97 Likewise, the way
in which Louisa Connolly describes herself as constantly
looking at and wearing the portrait-object sent by her sister
68
ART BULLETIN
NUMBER
1
suggests the "situated character of social practices"98 rather
than the circularity of the potlatch.
While anthropological concerns with human-object entanglement relate the phenomenon to migrations and human displacement, when people take with them not only
useful objects but also items that can set up contexts for
selective remembering,99 the tradition of sociological thought
rooted in Georg Simmel draws attention to the historically
specific moment and is thus appealing to cultural historians
such as Kopytoff. But in arguing that value becomes suprasubjective, supraindividual through exchange, yet without
becoming an objective quality and reality of the things
themselves, Simmel deflects attention away from artifact and
onto process or agency.100 Kopytoff's concept of the biography of objects is an attempt to pull it back. While palpably
interested in the use of precious metals andjewelry, insofar as
they indicate a relation between individuals, Simmel attributes the "whole significance of adornment" to the need
to attract the attention of others.Jewelry is thus significant for
its owner only indirectly, that is, as relational to other
people.101
Another way through this would be to focus first on the
portrait element within the gift and second on the primary
characteristics of wearing or holding, which, as I have established, bring into play body contact. And this is true even if
the object is locked away or stored, since it remains a defining
characteristic and therefore at the imaginary and symbolic
level a shaping concept. With the phrase "bring into play" I
intend to invoke the ideas of the ludic, of toys, and of
miniaturization. If we pursue Louisa Connolly's claim to
dependency on her sister's image we have an interesting
rhetorical trope in which a young woman is constantlywearing
and constantly gazing at an image of another human subject
that is attached to her own body. So when she looks she sees
not only other but also self.
My intention in this essay has been to get closer to a sense of
the historical relationship between individual subjects and
marvelous toys as gifts that incorporate acts of portrayal.'02
These portrait-objects, I have argued, are less imitations of the
real world than tactile artifacts to be held, viewed, and shown.
Socially, there is clearly agreement, albeit unacknowledged,
about the rules of these games. These rules involve sophisticated levels of artistry; a cultural recognition of portrait
representations and traces of self as affective; elements of
surprise, revelation, and ostentation; and an understanding
of the body as performative. But, asJohan Huizinga pointed
out in his classic study, there is always something at stake in
play.103So what is it that is at stake here?
In Playing and Reality, his classic psychoanalytic study of
children, Donald Woods Winnicott explains that whereas
object relations take place in the world of fantasy, to use an
object the subject must have developed a "capacity to use
objects,"104 and this, says Winnicott, is part of the change to
the reality principle that is an essential part of the process
whereby the subject recognizes itself as separate, as an
individual.105 It is worth remarking here how men in the
eighteenth century, with fob watches and orders, and women,
with brooches and lockets, attached objects to their breasts.
But we need not press this point to recognize that in
discussing the crucial transition taking place when a baby is
feeding on itself because breast and baby have not yet become
(for the baby) separate phenomena and, on the other hand,
when the baby is feeding from an other-than-me source,
Winnicott is identifying a principle.106
Winnicott's interest in culture and creativity lends his work
a particular resonance for art historians. Indeed, he proposes
the "interplay between originality and the acceptance of
tradition as a basis for inventiveness ... to be just one more
example, and a very exciting one, of the interplay between
107However, what is most interesting
separateness and union."
from my point of view is that for Winnicott the breast as the
original object extends eventually to the environment, and
that it is in the potential space between the individual and the
environment that cultural experience, first manifest in play, is
located.108 Play, in Winnicott's model, is "neither a matter of
inner psychic reality nor a matter of external reality." It is
through the transitional object (at the clinical level this is the
famous identification of the child's comforter) that the child
is able to symbolize "the union of two now separate things,
baby and mother, at the point in time and space of the
initiation of their separateness."109 Creativity comes into this
account because the infant creates the object, but at the same
time the object was there waiting to be created and become a
cathected object.110 Winnicott's insistence on the distinction
between relating (that is, projecting feelings onto something)
and usage, which necessitates taking account of the object
itself, is highly illuminating for an understanding of the
functioning of what I have called portrait-objects. These
artifacts are transitional in all kinds of material ways (half
jewelry, half portrait painting) and also in symbolic ways
(half public, half private). Moreover, like Winnicott's transitional object, they signify through usage, through play. The
transitional object and the portrait-object serve both to
underscore absence and to defend the possessor against it.
One explanation for the abundant presence of miniature
portraits on precious artifacts is that such objects, worn and
held by one subject and representing another, permit the
realization of self within the familial and social structures of
eighteenth-century England. In an environment replete with
simulated presence, a kind of Celine-like castle of endless
replicas1l or a Hogarthian interior where ancient portrait
representations loom threateningly over an increasingly chaotic present,112 what is at stake is the construction of personhood, the identity of the individual subject.113 Like other
defenses (such as the debates on luxury or the preoccupation
with politeness), the gem-encrusted portrait-object, ringfenced from the real by miniaturization, materials, and
technology, is given to be worn in a game that is more than
competitive in the merely social or diplomatic sense. The
portrait-object offers the prerequisite transitional object that
can insist its bearer is at one and the same time socially
attached and individually separate.
To return to my starting point-with the museum environment-I will conclude with a general, historical, and intentionally speculative observation. The gazing game for which the
portrait-object is the prerequisite, a game that links private
and public spaces, works to define individual subjectivity in
ways that are socially infectious. In so doing it subverts the
hegemony of full-scale portraiture. The dominant genre of
the publicly exhibited large-scale image reasserts its claim to
MINIATURE
authority and negates the materiality of the portrait-object by
incorporating the miniature as mise-en-abyme,thus producing
a potentially endless process of deferral. Historiographically
this process may be seen to contribute to, and to be made
visible within, the curatorial and academic prioritizations that
have relegated the materiality of the miniature to the margins
of historical inquiry.
Marcia Pointon is Pilkington Professor of History of Art at the
Universityof Manchester.Her booksinclude Naked Authority: The
Body in Western Painting 1830-1908 (1990), Hanging the
Head: Portraiture and Social Formation in EighteenthCentury England (1993), and Strategies for Showing: Women,
Possession and Representation in English Visual Culture
1665-1800 (1997) [School of Art History and Archaeology,University of Manchester;ManchesterM13 9PL, Eng.]
Frequently Cited Sources
Murdochet al.,John, TheEnglishMiniature(New Haven:Yale UniversityPress,
1981).
Stewart, Susan, On Longing: Narratives of the Miniature, the Gigantic, the Souvenir
(Durham,N.C.:Duke UniversityPress, 1993).
ed.
Walpole, Horace, The YaleEdition of Horace Walpole'sCorrespondence,
WilmarthSheldon Lewis,35 vols. (New Haven:YaleUniversityPress, 1955).
Notes
A short version of this paper was presented at the College Art Association
annual meeting in Toronto, 1998;I would like to thank MarkCheetham and
Alison Conway for their invitation to contribute to "New Approaches to
Portraiture."I would also like to thank StacyBoldrick,Diana Donald, Harriet
Guest, MarkJones, Christopher Lloyd, Stephen Lloyd,John Murdoch, and
LucyPeltz for generously responding to questions and offering their advice.
1.Jean-Andre Rouquet, ThePresentStateof theArts in England(London:J.
Nourse, 1755), 33.
2. Henry Angelo, preface to Reminiscences
ofHenryAngelowithMemoirsofHis
LateFatherand Friends,vol. 1 (London: Henry Colburn, 1828). Portraitsin
18th-centuryEngland, in addition to the well-recognizedmedia of sculpture,
painting, drawing,and print, were executed in an extraordinarilywide range
of media, including embroidery,wax, shells, plaster,and all forms of ceramic.
A room in Burton Constable has wallpaperdecorated with portrait heads of
the duke of Wellington dating, presumably,from about the second decade of
the 19th century.
3. For an analysisof portraitureas organizationalconcept and practice in
18th-centuryEngland, see MarciaPointon, Hanging theHead:Portraitureand
Social Formationin Eighteenth-Century
England (New Haven: Yale University
Press, 1993). For issues of 18th-centuryluxury, see, for example, the classic
account byJohn Sekora, Luxury:TheConceptin Western
Thought,EdentoSmollett
(Baltimore:Johns Hopkins UniversityPress, 1977).
4.Johann Wilhelm von Archenholz, A Picture of England: Containinga
Descriptionof theLaws, Customs,and Mannersof England,new trans. (London:
n.p., 1797), 316.
5. ChristopherLloyd and VanessaRemington, Masterpieces
in Little:Portrait
Miniaturesfrom the Collectionof Her MajestyQueenElizabethII (London: Royal
Collection Enterprises,1997).
6. John Murdoch, Seventeenth-Century
EnglishMiniaturesin theCollection
of the
VictoriaandAlbertMuseum(London: StationeryOffice, 1998), 2.
7. See Murdoch et al., 177. The question of the displayof miniaturesat the
RoyalAcademy exhibitions, which commenced in 1769, will be dealt with in
the exhibition at SomersetHouse, A RageforExhibitions
and the accompanying
publication, edited by D. Solkin, published byYaleUniversityPress,2001.
8. Lord Ronald Gower, The GreatHistoricGalleriesof England (London:
Sampson, Low, Marston, Searle and Rimington, 1881), vol. 2, 29. One
surviving 18th-century arrangement comprises a series of miniatures of four
members of the family of Paul Vaillant, attributed to Joseph Daniels, ca. 1790,
in their original gilt frames, arranged as a kind of beribboned posy hanging
from a trompe l'oeil ribbon and clearly intended to be hung on the wall,
reproduced in Tessa Murdoch, ed., The Quiet Conquest: The Huguenots 16851985, exh. cat., the Museum of London, 1985, cat. no. 254, color pl. 11.
PORTRAITS
ENGLAND
69
9. I am indebted to John Murdoch for an insight into the complex
construction of those parts of the ensemble that historiansof art have tended
to discard: "Seventeenth-centurygold and champleve enamel locket with a
convex back, enamelled all over the outside, within outlines reserved in gold,
with a device of swirlingasymmetricaldesign, made up of foliate scrollsending
in a 'flower' of diminishing beads (cosse de pois), in a narrowborder, all in
opaque white on a ground of translucentblue; the rounded edge is blue with
the arris reserved as a thread of gold, between pairs of white dots; the glass
convex, chamfered at the rim;the hanger a rim loop set on a double arch, the
sides enamelled blue, with two white blobs on short pins above each arch;
below the loop are three hinge barrels, and at the bottom a clip post for the
cover;underneath, a lug pierced for the pendant (probablya pearl) now lost.
Manysmall areasof enamel lost. The front cover also in champlev6enamel of
similar design; the hinge plate in white enamel with the reserved gold in
symmetricalscrolls;the inside of the lid engravedwith strap-workknot to the
edges of the oval .. ."; Murdoch (as in n. 6), no. 56. Murdoch acknowledges
the help of MichaelSnodin in the analysisof frames.
10. This statute, 12 Geo. 2, is known as the Plate Offences Act. All statutes
relating to goldsmiths are contained in a single volume in London, Goldsmith's Hall Library, 736 Q 1. A summary of all the statutes affecting
goldsmithing is to be found in TouchingGoldand Silver:500 Yearsof Hallmarks,
exh. cat., Goldsmith'sHall, London, 1978.
11. On this problem, see Horace Walpole,writingin EuropeanMagazine,May
1782, 325.
12.Johann Wolfgangvon Goethe, "The Collector and His Circle" (from
Propylien,vol. 2, sec. 2, 1799), Letter II, in John Gage, ed., Goetheon Art
(London: ScolarPress, 1980), 34.
13. Emily J. Climenson, Passagesfrom the Life of Mrs. Philip LybbePowys
1756-1808 (London: Longmans,Green, 1899), 116, Mar.6, 1767, my italics.
14. Rev.WilliamMasonto Horace Walpole,Mar.3,1775, in Walpole,vol. 28,
182 ("I congratulateyou on your new miniatures,though I know they will one
day become Court property and dangle under the crimson-coloured shop
glass of our gracious Queen Charlotte"). Walpole himself observed at
BuckinghamHouse in the 1780s "six large frames,in one room, glazed on red
Damask,holding a vastquantityof enamelled pictures,miniatures,& Cameos,
amongst which six or eight at least of CharlesIst" and complained that many
were faded by exposure to the light. They also included contemporaryfamily
portrait miniatures that the royal couple had commissioned. "Horace Walpole's Journals of Visits to Country Seats," WalpoleSociety16 (1928): 79. This
standsin contrastto the old-fashionedarrangementsthat Walpolesawat Ham
House in 1770, where there were "In a closet many fine small pictures and
miniatures";ibid., 67.
15. See Susan Staves,MarriedWomen's
in England1660-1833
Separate
Property
(Cambridge,Mass.:HarvardUniversityPress, 1990); and Eve TavorBannet,
"The MarriageAct of 1753: 'A Most Cruel Lawfor the Fair Sex,' " EighteenthCenturyStudies30, no. 3 (1997): 233-54.
16. On The Lady'sLast Stake,see Marcia Pointon, Hogarth'sSigismundain
Focus(London: Tate, 2000).
17. Murdochet al., 6-17, 177-80.
18. The term was first used by Daphne Foskettin EnglishPortraitMiniatures
(1952), ed. Graham Reynolds (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
1988), chap. 12.
19. Walley Chamberlain Oulton, The Memoirsof Her Late MajestyQueen
Charlotte
(London:J. Robinson, 1819), 106-7.
20. Louisa Connolly, quoted in Stella Tillyard, Aristocrats:Caroline,Emily,
Louisaand SarahLennox1740-1832 (London:Vintage, 1994), 96.
21. John Gwynn,LondonandWestminsterImproved
(London: Dodsley,Bathoe,
Daviesand Longman, 1766), 59.
22. AlisonConway,"Fielding'sAmeliaand the Aestheticsof Virtue,"EighteenthCenturyFiction8, no. 1 (Oct. 1995): 42-43, 46-49. Ameliawas published in
1751.
23. See Nicholas Thomas, EntangledObjects(Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard
UniversityPress, 1991), 17. For an analysisof the shift in the deployment of
miniatures from aristocratic to bourgeois possession, with a focus on the
importance of this type of artifact in the plot of Mozart's The MagicFlute
(1791), see CarrieAsman, "Zeichen, Zauber,Souvenir:Das Portratmedaillon
als Fetisch in 1800," WeimarerBeitrdge43,
no. 1 (1997): 6-16.
24. In Apr. 1740, Elizabeth Montagu wrote to her mother "I was at Mr.
Zincke'syesterdayin the morning where I am to sit for my picture";a few days
later she tells her mother, "Wentto Mary-le-BoneGardens to breakfastwith
Duke and Duchess of Portland. Mr. Achard, Lord George Bentinck, Lady
Throckmorton, Mrs. Collingwood, and Sir Robert Throckmorton ... after
that they all went with me to Zincke's to sit for my picture, and we spent the
Her
evening at Vauxhall";ElizabethMontagu:The Queenof the Blue-Stockings;
Correspondence
from 1720 to 1761, ed. EmilyJ. Climenson (London:J. Murray,
1906), 46.
25. [WilliamCombe], introduction to A PoeticalEpistleto SirJoshuaReynolds
(London: Fielding and Walker,1777).
26. Memorialand commemorativejewelsare a feature of the cult of Charles
the Martyr;see, for example, the report of a memorial ring of CharlesI with an
enamel portrait of that king in the Proceedingsof the Societyof Antiquaries 3 (Apr.
1853-June 1856): 86. The pearlworn by CharlesI at his execution wasa greatly
valued relic in the 18th century. See Horace Walpole, TheDuchessof Portland's
Museum,ed. WilmarthSheldon Lewis (NewYork:GrolierClub, 1936), 10.
70
ART BULLETIN
NUMBER
1
27. See Murdochet al., 164.
28. Alexander Day to Prince Hoare, Rome, July 30, 1780, New Haven,
Beinecke Library,YaleUniversity,Osborn files D.
29. Olive Craster'saccount book, Newcastle-upon-Tyne,Northumberland
CountyRecord Office, Crastermss, Z CR 20.
30. Murdochet al., 164.
31. For a detailed discussion of the relationship between visuality and
economic value around questions ofjewelry,see MarciaPointon, "Valuingthe
Visual and Visualizing the Valuable:Jewelry and Its Ambiguities," Cultural
Values3, no. 1 (an. 1999): 1-27.
32. Nathanial Hone's pocket journal, London, British Library,Add. ms
44024.
33. S. Devisme toJames, firstearl of Charlemont,Apr.21, 1754, in Historical
12th Report(London: His Majesty'sStationery Office,
ManuscriptsCommission
1891), 193 (where the correspondent's name is inaccuratelytranscribedas
Devisne).
34.James Fog to Sir John Delaval,June 23, 1772, Newcastle-upon-Tyne,
NorthumberlandCountyRecord Office, Delavalmss, 2 DE 31 10/65.
35. For an analysisof the cultural implications of hair work in jewelry, see
MarciaPointon, "WearingMemory:Mourning,Jewellery,and the Body," in
TrauerTrdgen,ed. Gisela Ecker (Munich: Fink, 1999); idem, "Materialising
ed. MariusKwint,ChristopherBreward,and
Mourning,"in MaterialMemories,
JeremyAynsley(Oxford:Berg, 1999).
36. For an account of the development of the diamond trade in this period,
see GedaliaYogev,Diamondand Coral:Anglo-Dutch
Jewsand Eighteenth-Century
Trade(Leicester:LeicesterUniversityPress, 1978).
37. Dame ElizabethHeron, PROB11 / 776 quire 46, fol. 402, signed Dec. 1,
1742, proved Feb. 14, 1749; transcribed in Marcia Pointon, Strategies
for
in EnglishVisualCulture1665Showing:Women,Possessionand Representation
1800 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997), 338-39. The difficulty of
attribution with regard to miniatures (see, for example, the discussion in
Murdoch et al.) is a further consequence of this relativelack of concern with
artistsas compared with materials.
38. Erasmus,quoted in Alois Gerlo, Erasmeet sesportraitistes:
Metsijs,Durer,
Holbein(Brussels:Cercle d'Art, 1950), 10.
39. Marcel Mauss, The Gift: The Formand Reasonfor Exchangein Archaic
Societies
(1950), trans.W. D. Halls (London: Routledge, 1989), 12.
40. The Hon. LadyCatherineJones,PROB11 / 702, quire 147, fols. 276-78,
signedJune 7,1730, proved May13, 1740, transcribedin Pointon (as in n. 37),
311-12.
41. I am grateful to MarkJones,director of the RoyalScottish Museum,for
allowing me to read in manuscript his fascinating account of the Bute
snuffbox, acquiredby the museum in 1997. He points out that in 18th-century
Europe there was an established hierarchyof gifts, at the apex of which stood
the tabatiere,and he offers an explanation of the iconography of this box in
relation to the accession of George III.
42. Mrs.Donellan to ElizabethMontagu,July11, 1740, quoted in Climenson
(as in n. 13), 53. On why the line between cash and a gift is so carefullydrawn,
see Mary Douglas and Baron Isherwood, The Worldof Goods:Towardsan
(London:Allen Lane, 1979), 59.
Anthropology
of Consumption
the
43. Mary Douglas, "Why Do People Want Goods?" in Understanding
Culture:Themesin the Workof MaryDouglas,ed. Shaun Hargreaves
Enterprise
Heap and Angus Ross (Edinburgh:EdinburghUniversityPress, 1992), 25.
44. Designs of this kind can be readilyaccessed through compendiums such
as Susan Lambert, ed., Pattern and Design: Designsfor the DecorativeArts
1480-1980 (London:Victoriaand AlbertMuseum, 1983); and Henri Hymans,
dela Bibliotheque
d'ornement
ed., Estampes
Royale(Brussels:n.p., 1907).
45. Anna Somers Cocks, "Louis XIV's Official Present of Jewellery," The
InternationalSilverand JewelleryFair and Seminar,exh. cat., the Dorchester,
London, 1985, 11-12.
46. Typescript transcription of George Fox's biography of the firm of
Rundell, Bridge, and Rundell, in London, NationalArt Library276.E.3, p. 41,
original ms presented to the Baker Library,HarvardUniversity,Cambridge,
Mass.,by the great-granddaughterof the author.
47. Ibid.
48. Walpoleto Thomas Mann,Nov. 14, 1775, in Walpole,vol. 24, 143.
49. Patricia Fumerton, CulturalAesthetics:RenaissanceLiteratureand the
Practiceof Social Ornament(Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1991), esp.
chap. 3.
50. See, for example, Oulton (as in n. 19), 77, 241: "Prince Charles of
Mecklenburg ... received his Majesty'spicture very richly set in diamonds"
and "Mr.Eden presented his Majestywith a picture of the King of France,
richly set in diamonds." See also the sale catalogue following the death of
Queen Charlotte, A Catalogueof a SuperbAssemblage
of Jewels,Trinkets.....
Christie's,London, May17-19, 1819.
51. CourtandPrivateLifein theTimeofQueenCharlotte,
BeingtheJournals
ofMrs.
Papandiek...., ed. Mrs. Vernon Delves Broughton (London: Richard Bentley,
1887), vol. 1, 12. The ring is now in the royal collection. After Charlotte's
death it became the property of her eldest daughter, who left it to Queen
Victoria. See Olwen Hedley, Queen Charlotte (London: John Murray, 1975),
333. Richard Walker, TheEighteenthand Early Nineteenth CenturyMiniatures in the
Collection of Her Majesty the Queen (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
1992), xv, points out that Meyer's profile of George III for the coinage,
believed to have been drawn from memory, earned him a gold medal at the
RoyalSociety of Arts in 1761 and was adapted for the miniaturesused in the
queen'sjewelry.Meyer'sassociationwith the court went back earlier than this,
as he was in all likelihood in associationwith Thomas Pingo for the medal for
the Majorityof the Prince of WalesissuedJune 4, 1759.
52. Walker(as in n. 51), xvi, points out that the queen is shown wearingthe
bracelets (although only one is visible) in SirJoshua Reynolds'soil sketch of
the marriage ceremony, in John Zoffany's1771 portrait, in Benjamin West's
portraitsof 1776 and 1777, and in Sir WilliamBeechey's portraitof 1796, and
Queen Victoriawearsone of them in FranzWinterhalter'sTheFirstof May.In
fact, we only ever see one of what was a pair. Moreover,according to Hugh
Roberts, curator of the Royal Collection, the one bracelet that was photographed (that on which the portraitis mounted) is lost (perhaps used in the
composition of another item of royaljewelry).
53. Benjamin Rush, Residenceat the Court of London, 3d ed. (London:
Hamilton,Adams, 1872), 155-56.
54. Stewart,48. In this passage Stewartis drawingon Claude Levi-Strauss's
celebrated analysisof Fouquet in TheSavageMind (London: Weidenfeld and
Nicolson, 1966).
55. Stewart,53.
56. TheVauxhallAffrayor,theMacaronies
of all the
Defeated:
Beinga Compilation
Dedicationto
Letters,Squibs,&c. on bothSidesof thatDispute;withan Introductory
theHon. Tho.Lyttelton,Esq.(London:J. Williams, 1773), 71. For discussion of
this episode from other points of view, see KristinaStraub, SexualSuspects
(Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1992); and Peter de Bolla, "The
Visibilityof Visuality,"in Visionin Context,ed. Teresa Brennan and MartinJay
(NewYork:Routledge, 1996).
57. See Diana Scarisbrick,Jewelleryin Britain1066-1837 (Norwich:Michael
Russell, 1994), pl. XXXV. The bracelets contain centerpieces with a rose-cut
diamond royal cipher and a maritime trophy of anchor, trumpet, flag, and
cannon on blue enamel.
58. See, for example, catalogue entries in Lloydand Remington (as in n. 5).
59. Diamonds were subject to experiment to reveal their phosphorescence
since the time of Robert Boyle (1663); their combustibility was partly
established by the Florentine academicians in 1694 and continued to be of
great interest throughout the 18th century. Walpole describes one such
experiment on diamonds conducted in Vienna in a letter to LadyMaryCoke,
Aug. 22, 1771, in Walpole, vol. 31, 158. The proof that diamonds are pure
carbon came in 1797 with experiments by Smithson Tennant.
60.James Northcote is reported to have spoken of the authenticity of
"relics"while relatinghow Mrs.Gwynnhad the poet OliverGoldsmith'scoffin
opened up in order to secure a lock of his hair.See Stephen Gwynn,Memorials
Painter(JamesNorthcote)(London: T. Fisher Unwin,
of an Eighteenth-Century
1898), 92-93. Within the tradition of the Protestantliterature of sentiment,
the imagery of relics was germane to the discourse of personal affection and
commitment, as, for example, withJohn Donne's "The Funerall":"Whoever
comes to shroud me, do not harme / Nor question much / That subtile
wreathofhaire, which crownsmy arme .. . / Whatere shee meant by'it,buryit
with me / For since I am / Love's martyr,it might breed idolatrie, / If into
others hands these Reliques came...."; in HerbertJohn Clifford Grierson,
ed., Metaphysical
Century(Oxford:Clarendon
Lyricsand Poemsof theSeventeenth
Press, 1958), 18-19.
61. Georgiana Cavendish [the duchess of Devonshire], TheSylph,3d ed., 2
vols. (London: T. and W. Lowndes,1783), vol. 2, 42-43.
62. Orest Ranum, "Encrustation and Power in Early Modern French
Baroque Culture," YaleFrenchStudies,no. 80 (1991): 203-6.
63. Igor Kopytoff,"The CulturalBiographyof Things," in TheSocialLifeof
ed. Arjun Appadurai (Cambridge:
in CulturalPerspective,
Things:Commodities
CambridgeUniversityPress, 1986), 80.
64. Stewart,chap. 2.
65. Andr6 Gide, Journals 1889-1949, trans. Justin O'Brien (Harmondsworth:Penguin, 1967), 31.
66. Lucien Dallenbach, TheMirrorin theText(1977), trans.JeremyWhiteley
with Emma Hughes (Cambridge:Polity Press, 1989), 8. For an illuminating
reading back into visual imagery of Dallenbach's analysisof Gide, see Joseph
Art (Chicago:
in GermanRenaissance
L. Koerner, TheMomentof Self-Portraiture
Chicago UniversityPress, 1993), 55-56.
67. Dallenbach (as in n. 66), 17.
68. See especially Linda Colley,Britons:ForgingtheNation 1707-1837 (New
Haven:Yale UniversityPress, 1992); and Frank Prochaska,RoyalBounty:The
(New Haven:YaleUniversityPress, 1995).
Monarchy
Makingof a Welfare
69. See ErnstHartwigKantorowicz,TheKing'sTwoBodies:A Studyin Medieval
PoliticalTheology
(Princeton:Princeton UniversityPress, 1957).
70. See, for example, the portrait miniatures of John Cox Dillman Engleheart (1784-1862), examples of whose work are in the FitzwilliamMuseum,
Cambridge.
71. This is readily inferred from the chronologically selected examples in
the OxfordEnglishDictionary.
72. Cavendish (as in n. 61), vol. 1, 101.
73. The box, measuring 1 3/4 inches in height, was sold at Christie's,
London, Mar. 8, 1995, lot 21. I am grateful to Perry Chapman for the
suggestion that on account of the profile and the garland, the unidentified
portrait may be interpreted as posthumous.
74. S. Devisme to James, first earl of Charlemont (as in n. 33), 193. The
authoritative history of such objects is Abraham Kenneth Snowman, Eighteenth-
MINIATURE
CenturyGoldBoxesof Europe(1966; reprint, Woodbridge:Antique Collectors
Club, 1990).
75. Described in Robert K. Massie, Peter the Great:His Life and World
(London: Gollancz, 1981), 230.
76. For a description of this famous piece, see Joan Evans, A Historyof
1100-1870 (1953; reprint,NewYork:Dover, 1989), 89-91.
Jewellery
77. Walpoleto the earl of Buchan, Nov.29, 1792, in Walpole,vol. 15,233-34.
78. Rev.Samuel Bishop, "To Mrs.Bishop on Her WeddingAnniversary,"in
ThePoeticalWorksof theRev.SamuelBishop,A.M. (London: A. Strahan, 1796),
vol. 2, 22-23.
79. For details of the history of this painting, see Anthony M. Clark,Pompeo
Batoni:A Complete
CatalogueofHis Works(Oxford:Phaidon, 1985), cat. no. 305.
The painting measures 108 1/4 by 74 1/2 in. (274 by 189.3 cm). Clark
proposes that the traditional identification of the second man as Sir Sampson's tutor cannot be correct and suggests it may be Francesco Barazzi, a
wealthymerchant and friend of Batoni.
80. See, for example, Giacomo Casanova,Historyof My Life,vol. 9, trans.
WillardR. Trask(NewYork:HarcourtBrace, 1970), 179.
81. Queen Charlotte made regular payments to toy men in the 1770s for
small objects, regarded as curiosities, that on a modest scale recalled the
marvelous creations of Johann Melchior Dinglinger for the Grfines Gewolbe
in Dresden. See Treasurer'sAccount 1761-77, London, BritishMuseumAdd.
ms 17870, vol. 1. The sale following Queen Charlotte's death at Christie's,
London, May 17-26, 1819, contained many toys. On Dinglinger, see E. von
(Berlin:Mann, 1962).
Witzdorf,JohannMelchiorDinglinger
and Correspondence
82. The Autobiography
of Mary Granvillewith Interesting
Reminiscences
ed. Lady Llanover
of King Georgethe Thirdand QueenCharlotte,
(London: Richard Bentley, 1862), vol. 2, 495-96. The frontispiece to The
and Correspondence
Autobiography
of Mary Granville,Mrs. Delany, ed. Lady
Llanover (London: R. Bentley, 1861) consists, interestingly,of an engraved
vignette showing a locket with the hair of Queen Charlotte and a cameo of
King George III as worn by Mrs.Delany (opposite p. x, vol. 1, ser. 1).
83. Memoirsof WilliamHickey,ed. Alfred Spencer (London: Hurst and
Blackett,1913), vol. 2, 362.
84. Ada Earland,John Opie and His Circle(London: Hutchinson, 1911),
68-69.
85. See Emile Durkheim, TheElementary
FormsofReligiousLife(1912), trans.
K. E. Fields (NewYork:Free Press, 1995), 321-23.
86. Anna Seward, Monodyon MajorAndre:By Miss Seward... Towhichare
added,Lettersaddressedto herbyMajorAndrein the Year1769 (Lichfield, Eng.:
n.p., 1781). The poem is normallyreferred to by the title given in my text.
87. EdwardVerrallLucas,A SwanandHerFriends(London: Methuen, 1907),
59.
88. An AuthenticNarrativeof the CausesWhichLed to theDeathof MajorAndre
AdjutantGeneralin His Majesty'sForcesin NorthAmericabyJoshuaHett Smith
(London: Matthewsand Leigh, 1808), 170-71. The self-portraitis recorded in
a broadside in the Heinz Archiveat the National PortraitGallery,London.
89. MajorJohnAndre to Anna Seward,quoted in Lucas (as in n. 87), 70. For
an account of Seward's"Monody"as a patrioticelegy,see HarrietGuest, Small
Change:Women,Learning,Patriotism(Chicago:Chicago UniversityPress,2000),
chap. 10.
90. Lucas (as in n. 87), 79.
91. Seward(as in n. 86), 80 n.
92. Seward (as in n. 86), 80; and Abbot Suger of St. Denis, "De Consecratied. and
one," in AbbotSugeron theAbbeyChurchof St.-DenisandItsArt Treasures,
trans. Erwin Panofsky (1946; reprint, Princeton: Princeton UniversityPress,
1979), 117. Motivesin accounts of pilgrims taking relics in their mouths vary
PORTRAITS
ENGLAND
71
from veneration to deception (in order to steal them). Saint Hugh of Lincoln,
for example, outraged the monks of the abbey at Fecamp by kissing and then
biting a piece off a relic believed to be a bone from the arm of Saint Mary
Magdalen. See Ronald C. Finucane, Miraclesand Pilgrims:PopularBeliefsin
MedievalEngland(London: Dent, 1977), 44; for Saint Hugh, see Decima L.
Douie and Dom Hugh Farmer,TheLifeof St Hugh of Lincoln,vol. 2 (London:
Nelson, 1961-62), 169.
93. Seward(as in n. 86), 90.
94. Lewis Hyde, The Gift:Imaginationand the EroticLife of Property(1979;
reprint,NewYork:Vintage Books, 1983), xiv.
95. BronislawMalinowski,Argonautsof theWestern
Pacific:An AccountofNative
and Adventuresin theArchipelagoes
Enterprises
of MelanesianNew Guinea(1922;
reprint, New York:Dutton, 1961); Mauss (as in n. 39);Jacques Derrida, Given
Time,trans. Peggy Kamuf (Chicago: Chicago UniversityPress, 1992). For a
recent example of an effective methodological structure drawn from such
literature and used in an art historical account, see Adrian Randolph,
"Performing the Bridal Body in Fifteenth-CenturyFlorence," Art History21
(June 1998): 182-200.
96. On the duchess of Marlborough'sorganizationof her life and family,see
FrancesHarris,A Passionfor Government:
TheLifeofSarahDuchessofMarlborough
(Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1991). Sundry inventories of the duchess'sjewels,
indicating to whom they were lent or given, are in London, British Museum,
Add. mss Althorp Papers.
97. Hyde (as in n. 94), xvi.
98. DavidCheal, TheGiftEconomy(London: Routledge, 1988), 2-3.
99. See, for example, David Parkin, "Mementoes as TransitionalObjects in
Human Displacement,"JournalofMaterialCulture4, no. 3 (Nov. 1999).
100. Georg Simmel, ThePhilosophyof Money(1900), ed. David Frisby,trans.
Tom Bottomore and DavidFrisby,2d enl. ed. (London: Routledge, 1990), 76.
101. Ibid., 176-77.
102. The term "toy" is commonly used to describe an immense range of
fashionable personal trinkets;in the 17th and 18th centuries the term usually
implied precious materials,but with the advent of mass production the same
kinds of objectswere manufacturedcheaplyand distributedaround the world.
See RosemaryRansome-Wallis,MatthewBoultonand theToymakers:
Silverfromthe
Birmingham
AssayOffice,exh. cat., Goldsmith'sHall, London, 1982, 45.
in Culture
103.Johan Huizinga, HomoLudens:A Studyof the Play-Element
(1944), trans.R.F.C.Hull (reprint,London: Routledge, 1949).
104. Donald WoodsWinnicott, Playingand Reality(1971; reprint, Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1988), chaps. 1 and 3, esp. 104-5, quote on 105,
emphasis in original.
105. Ibid., 105.
106. Ibid., 104.
107. Ibid., 117.
108. Ibid., 118, my italics.
109. Ibid., 113-14.
110. Ibid., 104.
111. In his novel Castleto Castle(1957), trans. Ralph Manheim (London:
Blond, 1969), 121-25, Louis Ferdinand Celine describes the corridors and
halls of SigmarigenCastle,where he was interned, haunted by processions of
Hohenzollern "mugs," faces without shame, creators of dynasties, "whole
floors of portraits."
112. As, for example, in the breakfastscene in Hogarth's Marriaged la Mode
(1742-44).
113. There is a rapidly growing literature on these matters. For a good
introduction, see the essayscontained inJohn Brewerand Susan Staves,eds.,
(London: Routledge, 1995).
EarlyModernConceptions
ofProperty

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