Great and small
Basil Taylor
Samuel Cooper 1609-1672 Daphne Foskett (Faber £6.50)
amuel Cooper, the miniature painter, has ueen, for an artist who never ventured it seems beyond the limits of that form, extraordinarily admired in his own period and ,°;urs. To John Aubrey he was "the prince of "Tilers," to Pepys (whose wife he painted) the great limner in little," to Evelyn "that care limner," and according to Bernard Lens Was commonlymamed "Van Dyck in little." In recent times Graham Reynolds has called uirn "the greatest English-born portrait painter af. the seventeenth century," while David ,,'Per has given Cooper the higher status of }1.1e greatest face painter" of that age, and oY Strong, in the foreword to the present writes that he "cannot think of any 13ritish artist who is so neglected, as one of °Ur greats." Neglected not surprisingly, for ,(3,11e definition of miniatures might well be Tat they are pictures which a few collect, manY think of with a superstitious affection, 4Irnost no one carefully looks at, and which, sek kin-i cril if ever, have been the subject of the of penetrating and enlightening critical erpretation which has been applied to picLures
of a larger size and emotional scope. ti the estimates of Cooper I have quoted are "stifled, then he certainly deserves a book of uncommon merit if it is adequately to fill a gap which has long existed in the modern literature of English painting. Mrs Foskett, who has also published a useful dictionary of miniaturists, is by talent an antiquarian rather than an art historian, a critic or indeed an eloquent writer, and her main accomplishment has been carefully to assemble the sparse surviving information about Cooper's life, personality and practice without attempting to furnish a critical catalogue of the works or indeed a developed critique Of the artist's genius. This is a serviceable text whose usefulness has been severely crippled by the conduct of her publishers. Of this the most elementary is the absence of numerical cross-referencing between the words and the eighty-five plates, and the lack of dates in captions for the dated or datable examples. These plain discourtesies to the reader are one form of distraction but another is even more significant insofar as it effects the appreciation of miniatures. An essential characteristic of the best, the few works by Holbein in this form, for example, the portraits of John Smart, to cite an eighteenth century case, and of course Cooper's paintings, is that they are not just concentrations of form and physical detail on to a tiny surface, but require from a viewer a concentrated attention, an adjustment to the focus of his perceptual and intellectual experience. To put five works closely together on one page with the sitters' eyes starting out in a medley of directions is to make the appreciation of any one most difficult.
Miniature painting is an art limited not only by its small scale; it also lies by necessity within a narrow range of representational method and style. A miniature, a face painting in little, cannot have the force of handling and some modes of style we find in larger portraits, those of Goya, of late Rembrandt, Van Gogh or Kokoschka. Cooper was a great practitioner of the art because, for one thing, he filled the small vessel to the brim, in terms of the physical representation of the head and those mysterious, inexpressible qualities by which the sense of human presence and individual personality is conveyed.
Cooper lived and worked successullly under two very different regimes, the Commonwealth and the restored monarchy of Charles II; that is why it would be so interesting to know more than we do about the man and his relationships. He possessed one gift which is rare in English painting of any kind, an eloquent command of human form, even if it was only of the head, and he had another gift not so uncommon in the best English art, a tough down-to-earth directness infused with a lyrical, unsentimental tenderness. He was at his best in dealing not only with men — many .of the female portraits are diminished by a gloss of refinement, trammelled with a conventional femininity in the mode of the time — but with some of the most powerful, defiant or peculiar spirits of the period; Cromwell, Monck, the King; Clifford, Arlington, Ashley and Lauderdale of the Cabal; Hobbes and Cowley. We can obtain a more direct and convincing impression of them than can be had, in respect of other times, from the portraits of Kneller and Reynolds, Lawrence or Watts, flatterers all, in some measure or degree. Cooper had a most subtle command not only of physiognomical form, but of the impress which a head's complex shapes make upon the aerial space which surrounds it, the illusion of space into which a nose thrusts forward beyond the planes of the cheeks, the depression which lies between the chin and the edge of the lower lip. Through these particulars not merely likeness, but the way to characterisation, lies.
In a passage from his Anecdoates of Painting quoted by Mrs Foskett, Horace Walpole made some shrewd comments upon Cooper's genius. His works "are so bold that they seem perfect nature only of a less standard . . if a glass couia expand Cooper's pictures to the size of Van Dyck's they would appear to have been painted for that proportion." It is widely supposed that the miniature represents a scaling down of the visual experience and that the life-size portrait is closer to it. That is a fallacious simplification of a most complex matter, upon which both the making and a full experience of portraits depends. Cooper's heads are, on average, an inch and a quarter high, that being the dimension which we perceive in a figure placed about seven feet from the eye, a subtle balance therefore of detachment and intimacy. Cooper's art provides a marvellously rich and resonant expression of that equipoise.
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