THE HISTORY OF MINIATURE ART.*
THIS book is, partly at least, a specimen of a kind of literature which can scarcely be said to have any existence, except in rela- tion to the Christmas season. The development of the various illustrative processes of late years has much to answer for in this matter, for many books are now written mainly for the purpose of introducing certain plates ; and yet publishers are not frank enough to admit the fact, nor can they incur sufficient expense to give more than a certain number of illustrations to each work. The cost of these is so great, and the sale of Christmas books endures for so short a period, that it is scarcely possible for the author to be paid any sum that would remunerate him for thoroughly good work ; the consequence is that seven out of ten of these elaborately illustrated works are what is known in the trade as " made-up " productions, in which either the author has avowedly annexed the results of other men's labour and thought, or else has filled out some germ of an original idea with padding of all kinds.
The book before us is to some extent one of these, and yet there is evidence that Mr. Propert does honestly care for his subject of miniature-painting, and if he had been allowed
• The History of Miniature Art. By T. L. Propert. London: Macmillan an Co. to write a little essay thereupon, might have given us a work of considerable interest. Amusing, we fear, he never could have been ; his style is too cumbrous, too unrelieved by any free play of fancy or fresh points of view. It is not altogether in reproach we say that this author would make a valuable contributor to a cyclopmdia of knowledge. On every page we find evidence of the care and thoroughness with which he has prepared his subject, and every page, alas ! adds a little to the weight of the reader's boredom. How is it possible, for instance, to assimilate with any pleasure several hundred pages of information conveyed in such a style as this ?— " Thomas Sadler, son of a master in Chancery, began by painting
miniatures for his own amusement. He received instructions from
Sir Peter Lely in painting, but, owing to reverse of fortune, took to drawing miniatures as a profession. Amongst other portraits, he painted John Bunyan, which was engraved in mezzotint. Simon Digby, Bishop of Elfin, in Ireland, is mentioned in Graham as an accomplished miniaturist; many of his works were preserved at Sherborne Castle, the seat of the Digbys. Susan Penelope Rose was a daughter of Gibson, the dwarf, and the wife of a jeweller. She painted miniatures with great skill and freedom. A half-length portrait, eight inches by six, of an Ambassador from Morocco, dated 1682, is mentioned by Walpole with great praise. John Faber, the elder, came to England in 1695. A native of Holland, he was an engraver by trade ; he drew many miniatures on vellum with pen and ink, bat I can find no record of his attempting water colour."
Can we expect any one to read several hundred pages of this kind, particularly when the book in which it is entombed weighs some seven or eight pounds ? The truth is, the work is not intended to be read, it is intended
only to be glanced at. Its final cause, as we have hinted, is the production of the various plates, which are very beautifully executed photographs, by one of the collotype processes, of various miniatures. In this respect the work not only leaves little to be desired, but deserves very high praise. The miniatures selected are, on the whole, typical ones, and the reproductions are most beautiful and exquisite,—the page, for instance, devoted to Cosway's female portraits being, when one considers the difficulty of rendering by photo- graphy coloured work, a most wonderful example of mechanical skill. The delicacy of the originals has been preserved in this plate throughout, and though in one or two instances the photographer has been unable to overcome entirely the difficulties presented by the chemical action of certain colours upon the " sensitive " plate, on the whole the chiaroscuro is singularly correct. Above all, there is one merit in using photography for such work as this, which outweighs a number of occasional deficiencies ; and that is, that by this process alone is the actual touch of the original painter entirely preserved. If we had engravings of these miniatures by Cosway, and some of those by Humphrey or Plimer, we should probably see little difference in their painters' handiwork ; but compare them as shown in the photographs of this book, and the difference between the handiwork of the various masters is appreciated immediately.
To return to Mr. Propert. When for a brief space he leaves his dry biographical details, and proceeds to tell us something as to the manner in which the early miniatures were executed, and the rules under which the artists worked, his writing loses much of its dullness, and his research enables him to furnish us with a multitude of more or less curious facts, which want nothing but a little arrangement, and a better method of narration, to ensure our attention. The lack of arrangement is, indeed, the besetting sin of the book. It is, to use a slang expression, "all over the place ;" for though the chapters are divided into various historical periods, there is no connected narrative, and little attempt to trace the rise, progress, and decay of the art through its various stages, and to its final causes. The first quarter of the book, which is devoted to an account of missal- painting, is, indeed, almost wholly irrelevant ; for though minia- ture-painting seems at first sight to be intimately related to the art of illumination, the more we examine the works of the great miniature-painters, the more convinced we become that they owe their inspiration and their power not to the minuteness of the illuminator, but to the breadth and artistic spirit of the great portrait-painters. Mr. Propert himself sees this, for we find him attributing to the influence of Vandyke the finer qualities of Cooper's miniatures ; and Cooper, be it observed, is a miniature-painter whom, above all others, Mr. Propert admires.
It seems to have been the perverted industry of our author, rather than any strong conviction as to the necessity of describing the early missals and books of hours, which led him to give us this preliminary disquisition on the art of illumination ; but he
gives us little reason therein to believe that there is any con- nection between the later portraits which we speak of under the general name of miniatures, and the elaborate floral, geometrical, and religious subject decoration with which the old monks decorated their prayer-books. Indeed, all his research has apparently gone to prove the contrary, since Mr. Propert tells us (on p. 41) that though he thinks, for various reasons, that miniature portraits were occasionally executed by the old illuminators, he can only find one specific allusion to the practice. This specific allusion which he quotes is from Vasari, who, as we all know, is not invariably to be relied upon in his casual statements, and the statement in itself does not go farther than saying that Vasari knew that there were other works of Giulio Clovio besides those in the possession of celebrated people, which were in "small cases, containing beautiful portraits by his hand." It is not quite evident why Mr. Propert chooses to assume that this quotation shows any connection between the illuminator and the miniature artist, when he has previously said that no specimens whatever of single portraits of small dimensions have come down to us in the missals and various other illu- minated books of the earlier ages. This, he remarks, is "not wonderful," but to us it appears that, supposing such portraits were at all frequently painted, it is very wonderful indeed. The illuminated manuscripts and missals which exist in an almost complete state of preservation in the great libraries of Europe, are numbered by the thousand, and it is scarcely credible that some trace should not be found in them of the practice in ques- tion., supposing it had actually existed.
The origin of the art of miniature-painting may perhaps be more correctly sought for in the works of the early German and Flemish painters, from Mernling downwards. Their work was, it is true, but one step removed from the art of illumination ; but that step had taken it into an entirely different world. Those who are acquainted, for instance, with the series of panels painted by Memling, known as the "Chasse St. Ursule," which are still preserved at Bruges, will be able to trace in them at once both the precision and brightness of the old monkish work, and a broader and more natural mode of regarding the world and human beings than was possible to the ascetic mind. It is perhaps allowab'e to say that if there be one intellectual quality more marked than another in the whole history of miniature- painting, it is this absence of asceticism. Miniature-painting belongs, and always has belonged, it seems to us, to the " cakes- and-ale " department of life. That is one reason for its popu- larity; and it is notable that the old Flemish work, and especially Memling's, was of a very cheery, common-sense sort.
That an art of this kind will, at any given period of its development, more or less follow the fashion of the time, is certain enough ; and the extent to which miniature-painting has done this is carefully traced by Mr. Propert in the present book. In conclusion, we can only repeat that the author has been most patient, most industrious, and, as far as we have had time to examine his facts, most accurate ; that the book has been beautifully produced in the matter of printing, binding, and illustration ; and, on the bad side, that it is a trifle cumbrous, and more than a trifle dull.
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