Arts
Small wonders
John McEwen
Artists of the Tudor Court: the portrait miniature rediscovered 1520-1620 (V&A till 6 November)
Painter as Photographer and Richard Cadine, 1896-1980 (Camden Arts Centre till 29 July; Camden Arts Centre till 24 July and The Playhouse Gallery, Harlow, 22 September to 22 October)
ir Roy Strong has gone on record as kJ saying that his favourite object in the whole V&A collection is Nicholas Hilliard's miniature of 'The Young Man with Roses', so his 'portrait miniature rediscovered' exhibition — as brilliant a gathering together of Tudor and Jacobean miniatures as there could possibly be proves more than usually personal to him: a point emphasised by the fact that, amid all his present administrative duties, he has found time to catalogue it. And who would disagree very forcibly with his preference? Not only are these early jewel-like miniatures exquisite in themselves, they are also — in the era of their invention 7— peculiar to England, our one unique con- tribution to the arts of the Renaissance.
Miniature painting derived from the mediaeval art of book painting and appears to have been the invention of a Flemish painter working at the court of Henry VIII, Lucas Hornebolte. In terms of the masters of this art — and lesser hands are now ac- credited, notably, and for the first time in exhibition, that of the female Levina Teerlinc (1510/20-1576) — Hornebolte, crude but innovative, is followed chronologically by Holbein, Hilliard and Isaac Oliver. The greatest of these, the one who had the luck to find his art most matched with his hour, also happens to be the only Englishman of the four, the west countryman Nicholas Hilliard.
Holbein and Oliver, a Frenchman, were both modern men, practised in the latest European artistic conventions. Hilliard is insular, and flourished when Elizabethan protestantism insularly prevented aesthetic contact with Italy. He is out of date for his European time, an autumn rose of mediaevalism; his semi- worshipful art serving the mystical, magical, propaganda of the suspicious and beleaguered Elizabethan court to perfec- tion. The miniatures of Holbein and Oliver, for all the beauty of the former's script and the fancifulness of some of the latter's designs, invariably betray the fact that they are working against the grain of their more naturalistic and sophisticated inclinations. Holbein is too interested in character, Oliver knows too much about art, for the goldsmithery of limning; but Hilliard is a limner born. His miniatures are icons made with the conviction of belief, talismen that the Queen herself is known to have hidden in the most secret corner of her bedroom.
In his hands even the implements of the art — properly included in the exhibition seem an alchemical part of the allegories they served to immortalise: mussel shells as palettes, brushes made from the last joint of the tails of a specific species of squirrel, burnishers of the canine teeth of stoats or weasels with which to polish painted gold, vellum always backed by a playing card of (probably) significant suit. What other art could better have done justice to the court of the Moon Queen, with the Accession Day Tilts (on today's Horseguards) as the climax of its year? 'Lord Strange on a pageant car with the Stanley Eagle which stooped before the Queen; Lord Compton as the white knight; Sir Charles Blount as the sun; Robert Knowles 'laden with golden boughs'. Holbein and Oliver were disadvantaged in this as well. Holbein had for his subject the victimised women and unsentimental bruisers of Henry VIII's court: Oliver was confronted with the decadence of the Stuarts, playing at being Elizabethans. The pace and scale of the ex- hibition is sensibly varied by the inclusion of some life-size portraits and other suppor- tive material.
Painter as Photographer, an educational exhibition organised by the Arts Council and selected by Marina Vaizey, art critic to the Sunday Times, comes to rest in London after a long tour. By exhibiting photo- graphs taken or used by artists of the 19th century to the present, it demonstrates that photography has not been the death of painting at all, but rather its liberator. This needs to be dinned in, not least because such cultural pundits of our time as Burgess and Scruton are always, for some reason, condemning photography as the mechanical enemy of art. A book by Marina Vaizey, The Artist as Photographer (Sidgwick & Jackson, £12.95) complements the exhibition and proves more general, less clear and a poor production for the price. Categorisation and selection — beneficially contained by the narrower subject of the ex- hibition — are confused and arbitrary, but there is still enough to correct the Scrutons. Richard Carline is best known as the brother of Stanley Spencer's wife, Hilda; but he was also an artistic force in Hamp- stead for many years, an important com- mittee man in the national and interna- tional art world, and is revealed as a painter of ballast rather than imagination, but wor- thy as such. Certainly he deserves this tribute. The catalogue (authors Richard Morphet and Elizabeth Cowling) is ex- emplary.
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