IN MINIATURE. •
WHEN honest Mr. Cooper had made an end of strumming in secret upon that frivolous psaltery the French lute, and out of a hidden pack of the " Devil's picture-books " must pick a card for the head of Oliver Cromwell on the morrow, with what whimsical election would he choose it, one wonders, and was it a knave or an ace P There is fitness in such a matter ; later, when Monk had given London an Old Rowley for her Oliver, Samuel Cooper, become " the most famous limner of the world for a face," painted Charles II. on a king of diamonds, just as for an earlier miniaturist Elizabeth's card had been the queen of hearts. There is presage in such a matter often ; Cooper for his miniature of Monk would select the jack of clubs, and for Monmouth's fated face the coffin-shaped seven of spades. Cardboard, not ivory, was then the miniaturist's canvas ; ivory got its vogue, like walnut-wood for furniture, about the time of Queen Anne, A Cooper miniature bought in the Old Kent Road for eighteenpenoe one lucky evening is Admiral Blake on paper, but pasteboard was the favourite material, and a playing card the toughest piece of it then made. Perhaps a whole pack of such illustrious cards might be got together, among them that "picture of Queen Mary of Scotland, on a blue ground, square," which in Charles I.'s collection was treasure the twenty-third. These pictures for galleries in Lilliput have each a tradition; a cabinet of old miniatures is almost as rich in legends as in art. In the days when he might openly play cards and the lute Samuel Cooper could render the Cavalier splendour and swagger to a tittle, but he never excelled his severer Cromwells, as six or seven of them have lasted to prove to this day. Pre- paring for a sitting with the Lord Protector he would choose an ace or a knave, as the fancy took him, cover the pip or the jack with baby vellum, and then above the hidden emblem portray the master Puritan in his habit as he lived—the mystically glowing lineaments, coarse, flowing hair, and minute goatee. And godly Mr. Cooper would cap texts with the Protector the while, through sitting after sitting, as miniature after miniature was painted, for Cromwell had the obstinate vanity of the plain. When the Restoration ensued these tiny Cromwells discreetly disappeared, to lie _perdue for generations, emerging later in the least expected places, as old miniatures often do. Let us praise the precaution which hid the Cooperian Cromwells, since but for those few inches of vitalized card- board we should never have known what Oliver looked like in his heyday The larger portrait at Sidney Sussex College hardly shows that " brave ace " aright.
But where, alas ! is Cooper's portrait of the sweet harridan, Mrs. Pepys P One would travel far to get a sight of that. In Pepys's heyday Cooper had become "the great limner in little," an earlier and a nobler Cosway, a fashionable Lawrence in the small ; and therefore "Harris bath persuaded me to have Cooper draw my wife's portrait, which, though it cost £30, yet will I have done." So vows the diarist, and presently hies "to Cooper's" in fashionable Henrietta Street, Covent Garden, "and there find my wife, and here he do work finely ; and now I understand his great skill in music, his playing and setting to the French lute most excellently, and hea3peaks French, and indeed is an excellent man." Speaks French, indeed ! Oddsfish, and why not P Had he not gallanted it to Paris in his youth, and seen good pictures there, as well as at Amsterdam P Mrs. Pepys's portrait was " certainly a most rare piece of work as to the painting," and accordingly Cooper " bath £30 for his work, and the chrystal and gold case comes to 28 3s. 4d., the which I sent him this night, that I might be out of his debt." We shall never be out of debt to Mr. Pepys, however, nor ever, one fears, behold that portrait of Madam his wife. Maybe he destroyed it, as too flattering to the sitter : he was "not satisfied with the greatness of the resemblance," and who is so fixed as a husband concerning the looks of his wife P " Nor in the blue garment" was Pepys satisfied either; and certainly Cooper's habit was to neglect the dress for the face.
It is the face which lives, however ; no brush can make the " vesture's tissued flowers " perennial. It was to be another famous Mr. Cooper, a descendant of Samuel's very likely, who could render those flowers everlasting on " paper with a pin "—and a pen. Inspired by "the receipt of my Mother's picture out of Norfolk, the gift of my cousin, Ann Badham," Cowper was to write the most touching of his stateliest stanzas, and to bless " the art that can immortalize " in couplets which themselves shall hardly die. That portrait, too, has vanished, but no matter—it has been given a gentle sempiternity in verse. All art. can immortalize, but portrayal perpetuates ; whoso has seen Cooper's miniature of Charles II. knows the merry monarch to be still extant, more vivid there than even in the Abbey waxwork or Weekes's fine statue of him in Westminster Hall.
A miniature instinct with force and faithfulness revives and preserves ; the dead sitter dwells on in his housing of " chrystal and gold." That is true of all portraits, kit-cat size or full length, to which consummate art gives being. Perhaps the
dead are not so dead and effaced as we suppose. Something real persists in the eidolon ; the ghostliest place in all London
must be the National Portrait Gallery of a night. For there old friends are reunited, and there old enemies face one another again, lusting to be at each other's throats, and struggling out of their frames ; so that when the nocturnal guardian walks those ill-designed saloons he hears and sees a mutter and stir of the dead. Shadowy presences abide in any room that is hung with life-like old portraits ; they all but speak, almost their calm eyes smile. Sometimes, as one sits among them. in the stilly hour when the midnight clock gives warning, their life begins to animate the emptiness, and, as the lamp winks, a tense and all but cerement-breaking moment comes, and one's scalp creeps, and one's spine goes cold.
A miniature is a reliquary, not of charnel residues, but of protracted being. A portrait may be an altar-piece where memory worships, and the heart is sad that we did not speak, our affection while yet we might. Altar-pieces the earliest miniatures were, indeed ; pictures, not portraits. On the prie-dieu the candle-lit page of the missal or book of hours lay obvious, the ultramarine and vermilion tracing wreathing down from the great gold initial letter for virgin or saint within which the small picture of the saint or Madonna was set; against the diapered background the figure displayed its Byzantine crudity and abnormal length of limb ; while there in the oratory the Merovingian princess or nun of St. Hilda's told her beads and adored. In such rubricated pages a notable style and school of painting began, for the " Primitives" were little but miniaturists in the large. Some of the earliest panels are nothing but magnified vellum work; even portraits by Holbein show the missal touch.
Down through the deft fingers of Hilliard, the Olivers, and Hoskins the tradition descended from Holbein, until in Cooper's breadth and force came the aloe-flowering of the art. Miniatures had quite ceased to be Byzantine, and had not begun to be finicking. Coaway, 'limey, and Engleheart were degenerates really : they were little men working in little, with styles very exquisite, but not noble and strong ; Cosway was a limner of women, but Cooper a painter of men- Horace Walpole declared that if a lens could expand a Cooper miniature to the size of a three-quarter length by Vandyck, "I do not know but Vandyck would appear less great by com- parison." Art is no affair of size, else might a scene-painter excel a Constable, as in his metier perhaps he sometimes does. Cooper's miniature of himself is greater than any artist's self- portrait at Florence, and powerful as a Velasquez: it shows the long mouth, bony nose, and wide-apart eyes of a man of mind and temperament, a poet, and the Osesar of his particular Rome. And in his domain he remains supreme ; among painters for Lilliput the Rembrandt and king.
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