Chats on Old Miniatures

A study of French miniature painters has led the present writer to place their work on a higher level than has heretofore, perhaps, been generally assigned to it, and has shown...

The subject of enamel has a close relation to that of these pages, although its uses, as need hardly be said, far transcend the limits of portraiture. Every substance, whether e...

Those of my readers who are able to agree with the estimate already advanced in this work as to the unique position held by Samuel Cooper in the ranks of British miniature paint...

Probably there is no one miniature painter whose name is so familiar to the general reader as that of Richard Cosway, there is no one whose works in this particular branch of ar...

You would like to make a collection of old miniatures, did I hear my reader say? and you want to know the best way to set about it? Well, I can suggest one way: it is to become...

As in works by the old masters, so also this country is extremely rich in old miniatures. I am speaking now of private collections. Of course, by the very nature of the case, th...

When we come to get a little familiar with old miniatures, to have learned their language, as it were, we shall find that, if they are authentic portraits, they possess, in addi...

As with other branches of art, so with miniature painting, we cannot show any native-born artists of eminence until we arrive at the middle of the sixteenth century, when the se...

The private collections of the United Kingdom, scattered as they are all over the country, are by the nature of things not readily accessible to the general reader. But with the...

As we saw in a previous chapter, it is to a Frenchman, Jean Toutin, that the credit of applying enamel to portraiture must be given. It may be remarked, in passing, that it is s...

Andrew Robertson, his pupil Sir William Ross, Hayter, William Newton, and Robert Thorburn may be said to form a group of Victorian miniature painters, the last survivors of "the...

in the reigns of Henry II. and III., of Francis II. and Charles IX. of France, and that his work belongs to the period with which we are now dealing. Judged by the standard of h...

As Hilliard has made us familiar with the features of the most distinguished members of the Court of Elizabeth, so, a hundred years later, did Samuel Cooper, that "admirable wor...

Horace Walpole has asserted that this country has very rarely given birth to a genius in painting. "Flanders and Holland," says he, "have sent us the greatest men that we can bo...

in their smoothness and in the nature of their colouring, are quite unlike Cooper's ordinary manner; whilst in one instance at least the drawing is so bad as to make one sceptic...

It is a hundred years from the death of Samuel Cooper, which was in 1672, to the time when Cosway, Smart, and Humphrey may be said to have established their reputation as miniat...