"Mary Anne White Fitzgerald," attributed to George Freeman (1787/9-1868), circa 1850. United States.

 

Beloved Keepsakes

Miniatures in the Collection of Historic Hudson Valley

By Kathleen Eagen Johnson

SLEEPY HOLLOW, N.Y. Historic Hudson Valley's important collection of miniatures reflects changing tastes and technologies from the 1780s to the 1920s.

Often dismissed by scholars and the art-viewing public as overly sentimental, these small and complicated works currently enjoy renewed interest. Through September 7, these tiny tokens of esteem may be seen at the Philipsburg Manor Gallery in Sleepy Hollow.

Historic Hudson Valley's assemblage of miniatures and related objects is remarkable on several counts. The more than 20 artists whose identities are known represent a variety of backgrounds, styles, skills and approaches. Makers range from Richard Cosway (1742-1821), a premier English miniaturist of international reputation, to unknown American artists laboring in a folk style. Similarly, the levels of mastery run from what appears to be a valiant attempt by novice Lewis Livingston (1798-1821) to a remarkable portrait by prolific Anson Dickinson (1779-1852), whose technical facility allowed him to create 1,500 miniatures during his career.

The work of a cadre of miniaturists' painting in New York and New England, whose collective careers span the late Eighteenth to the mid-Nineteenth Centuries, form the core of the collection.

Anson Dickinson, Thomas Seir Cummings (1804-1894), George Freeman (1787/9-1868), Pamela Hill (1803-1860), John Ramage (c. 1748-1802), Nathaniel Rogers (1787-1844), and Walter Robertson (c. 1750-1802) rank as highly accomplished miniaturists.

Relatively few miniaturists signed their creations and so art historians rely on other resources to attribute objects to makers. Preserved histories, a particular strength of the collections of Historic Hudson Valley, aid in this process.

For example, a miniature dating from the early 1790s, with its story of star-crossed lovers, was treasured by successive generations of Van Cortlandts residing in the Croton manor house. At Sunnyside, several portraits of Washington Irving and his nieces and nephews remained in the family.

Members of the extended Montgomery/Livingston/Delafield family, who used their property Montgomery Place as a country seat, not only commissioned miniatures of themselves, but also assembled and catalogued similar likenesses of their European and American predecessors. Violetta Delafield's ancestors, the Whites and the Wetmores, form a large part of the Montgomery Place cache. These families did not forget their forebears. Knowing the identities of the sitters and makers, and understanding the family and personal associations that miniatures commemorate, is a relatively rare happenstance. Documentation makes the Historic Hudson Valley collection even more valuable.

While some artists worked as both miniaturists and canvas painters, the two professions drew on different materials and artistic skills. The miniaturist, working with materials that were more unruly than those employed by the canvas painter, was also called upon to master a more exacting, and largely irreversible, technique. Making a mistake often meant abandoning progress made and starting over. In addition, miniatures required as much time to execute as did larger works and, like paintings on canvas, usually required several sessions on the part of the sitter. Considering the stresses placed on miniaturists, it is no wonder that Washington Irving's friend George Harvey suffered a nervous breakdown after working feverishly as a miniature painter for a decade. He eventually gave up this most demanding vocation in order to preserve his physical and mental health.

Many miniaturists led a vagabond's existence, in part due to artistic temperament, but more often prompted by a constant and pressing search for clients. John Ramage's career took him from Dublin to London, Halifax, Boston, New York, and Montreal. Walter Robertson also hailed from Dublin and London. In 1793, he accompanied his friend, the artist Gilbert Stuart, to New York, worked there for two or three years, and then sailed for India. Based in Connecticut, Anson Dickinson journeyed from South Carolina to Canada with brush in hand. George Freeman, also from Connecticut, traveled back and forth to Britain. Initially drawn there for further art instruction, Freeman secured an appointment to paint Queen Victoria and Prince Albert from life, a well-publicized achievement that assured a ceaseless flow of sitters on this side of the Atlantic upon his return.

In order to survive, many miniaturists pursued alternative occupations. Some assumed the role of art academician. Thomas Seir Cummings helped found the National Academy of Design, where he served as a professor of drawing. John Ramage was also a jeweler. Jean Francois de Vall‚e (active 1785-1826), a French ‚migr‚ who fashioned the earliest portrait of Andrew Jackson, came to the United States with dreams of entering the cotton trade, but later worked as a boarding house keeper.

European artists who had never set foot on this continent provided further competition for miniaturists working here. Americans abroad took advantage of their artful surroundings and returned with small-sized portraits in hand. On an 1826 trip to Florence, Pierre Munro Irving, a nephew of the writer, commissioned a portrait set in an artistic interior, an appropriate allusion to that city.

Preparing materials was the first step in the creation of a miniature. By the late Eighteenth Century, most miniaturists preferred an ivory base. They had previously used, and on rare occasions continued to use, vellum. Ivory ovals underwent a process by which they were leached of any grease, bleached and polished. Miniaturists lightly but laboriously scored the ivory in order to encourage the colors to cling to it.

Paper was attached to the reverse side to help this unstable material resist warping and cracking, and to provide support for the ivory during the painting process. Early on, ovals cut from playing cards were a favored backing because of the card's relative thickness and stiffness. During the conservation process, several miniatures in the collection of Historic Hudson Valley yielded up supports that looked like the Queen of Hearts had been up to some devilment.

Most early American miniaturists followed in the British tradition of employing translucent colors when painting on ivory. By allowing the ivory to show through wherever possible, they exploited its luminosity to create glowing skin tones and fabrics. British and American miniaturists looked askance at Continental European artists who, in contrast, preferred to cover the ground with opaque colors and thus failed to take advantage of the visual warmth of the ivory. Miniaturists working in this style added an opaquifer such as gouache to watercolor. This "body color," as it is sometimes called, is thicker and, as the Nineteenth Century progressed, became more widely adopted in the United States.

As is the case with all artists, miniaturists developed their own style of painting hair, facial features, clothing, and background. Because miniaturists chose difficult materials to manipulate, they also had to acquire precise techniques for scratching the ivory and applying colors. A mature artist's pattern of cross-hatches, stipples, concentric lines and washes, discernible through magnification, is distinctive and did not change radically from portrait to portrait. Like the fingerprints that they resemble, these identifiable patterns form a basis of attribution.

Creating a miniature was a labor of immense precision. Like many modern-day technical manuals, treatises on miniature painting stressed the necessity of working in a dust-free environment. Applying colors using tiny brushes fashioned from sable hair or hairs plucked from the tip of a squirrel's tail, miniaturists usually took advantage of optical aids such as magnifying glasses to reduce eyestrain.

The evolution of miniature shapes echoed the fashion for larger paintings. Oval shapes predominated during the Eighteenth and early Nineteenth Centuries. Rectangular formats were employed during the early to mid-Nineteenth Century. Ironically, ivories grew relatively large as the century progressed. This development was made possible by a machine that could create bigger pieces of ivory by "unwrapping" the outer layer of a tusk and flattening it.

The preciousness of miniatures is underscored by the workmanship exhibited by their cases, examples of the jeweler's art worthy of study in their own right. Because the delicacy of a miniature's surface demanded protection, they were covered by glass and then encased. Many of the earliest miniatures were framed in cases of gold, gilded copper or pinchbeck, the last an alloy of copper and zinc that was gilded to resemble gold.

Women adorned themselves with tiny remembrances of their loved ones mounted as lockets and brooches or affixed to bracelets, a symbol of a "heart" literally worn on one's sleeve. The reverse of the miniature case sometimes bore further reference to the sitter in the form of an engraved name or monogram rendered as an artful embellishment.

The inclusion of the sitter's hair encapsulated under glass on the verso provided an intensely personal allusion. From a single curl to an elaborately braided plait, a hair component underscored the extremely intimate and individual nature of a miniature. Some miniaturists featured the sitter's hair still more prominently.

Our Nineteenth Century ancestors avidly saved, labeled and stored away hair as a tangible reminder of a time past. They even went so far as to employ it as a medium for artistic expression in the form of jewelry and wreaths, the latter composed of decoratively worked locks often garnered from a network of family members and friends and framed under glass. In contemporary American culture, with the exception of a baby's curls, hair cut from the body is generally considered repulsive, a belief contrary to that held during the Nineteenth Century. Today, hair is valued as a clue at a crime scene or as a biochemical, genetic register awaiting scientific analysis. Hair has lost its sentimental value. It is no longer the seat of the soul.

Not all miniatures were mounted as jewelry. During the Nineteenth Century, some were set in wooden or gutta-percha frames and hung on the wall like oils on canvas. More often, they were housed in leather cases and thus were protected from light damage and from scratches. Bound like a book and held together with brass hooks and eyes, this type of case, if square or rectangular in format, could stand upright, much like a modern, foldable photograph frame and was highly portable.

Mid- and late Nineteenth Century examples often had a decoratively cut velvet interior facing to protect the glass covering the miniature. Some leather cases from the turn of the Twentieth Century open to reveal a miniature attached to a velvet-covered, bifold, collapsible stand that can be raised to support the miniature in an upright position.

The scene of a woman contemplating a Classical monument served as a stock design at the turn of the Nineteenth Century. Art historians mark the Swiss Classicist Angelica Kauffman's painting "Fame Decorating the Tomb of Shakespeare" of 1772 as the prototype for thousands of subsequent formula pictures. Three miniatures in the Historic Hudson Valley collection each represent a specific phase of that image's evolution. The first, by John Ramage, honors the doomed love between a British soldier and Catherine Clinton, the daughter of a Revolutionary War patriot. The nobility of a hero's death is commemorated by a miniature dedicated to the late General Richard Montgomery. A third miniature illustrates the use of this image to express personal loss. As inscribed about the edge, this example commemorates the death of 14-month-old Laura Sophia Wilcox in 1794.

Miniatures memorialized the dead. They also marked notable points in the cycle of life - childhood, engagement and marriage, and old age. Like portraits rendered in any medium, miniatures made an attempt to halt time. A number of miniature portraits of children survive in the collection of Historic Hudson Valley.

Companion portraits marked union through marriage. It is thought that paired portraits of Anna Duer Irving (1807-1874) and Pierre Paris Irving (1806-1878) were painted to commemorate their wedding in 1826. This date is suggested by both the sitters' youth and by the portraits' oval shape, which characterized the work of the artist Nathaniel Rogers until the mid-1820s.

The exemplary life was also celebrated through miniatures. Anson Dickinson's depiction of weathered statesman Edward Livingston serves ably as a quintessential portrait of a great man. This member of New York's powerful Livingston clan led a life filled with accomplishment as well as heartache. Early political successes included election to the House of Representatives and to the mayoralty of New York. Disaster struck when the tax collector whom he had appointed absconded with all the city's revenues for the year 1803.

His personal life was no less tumultuous. Between 1801 and 1821, he lost his first wife and their three children to premature death. At the end of his life, he spent time with his second wife, Louise, and daughter, Cora, at Montgomery Place, a property he had inherited from his sister, Janet Livingston Montgomery.

Anson Dickinson created two versions of this portrait, now in the collections of the Metropolitan Museum of Art and Historic Hudson Valley. In a day book entry, Dickinson listed: "Washington City, February 3, 1827, Edward Livingston, Esq." The Metropolitan Museum's version, supposedly the first, portrays an awkwardly posed Livingston with his arm unnaturally manipulated into the frame; an inkwell and quill rest nearby. A second version, owned by Historic Hudson Valley, incorporates a more successful design.

The miniature of Edward Livingston, along with those of General Richard Montgomery, Judge Robert R. Livingston and Emperor Napoleon, were proudly displayed by subsequent owners of Montgomery Place who derived great personal pride from the accomplishments of their illustrious ancestors and famous associates. Within this stellar collection, an important miniature of Andrew Jackson, Livingston's long-term political ally and friend, was particularly prized.

The earliest known portrait of Andrew Jackson, a gaunt young major general with red hair and a coldly ambitious stare, represents two connotations associated with miniature as gift. Jean Francois de Vall‚e painted Jackson soon after the general's January 8, 1815 victory over the British at New Orleans, the battle that ended the War of 1812. Vall‚e's Continental European origins are apparent in his reliance on opaque colors and the rendering of Jackson's notoriously bushy mane slicked down to form wispy bangs in the French empire style. The image received wide distribution through an 1816 engraving attributed to ArsŠne LacarriŠre, a New Orleans engineer and architect, and an 1864 engraving by Alexander Hay Ritchie. Relatively early in its history, the miniature was reframed along with the following inscription: "Mr. E. Livingston is requested to accept this picture as a mark of the sense I entertain of his public services, and as a token of my private friendship and esteem. Headquarters N. Orleans. May 1st 1815. Andrew Jackson".

These sentiments meant a great deal to Livingston. The original note accompanying the miniature had been lost and he requested Jackson to pen the replacement copy seen here. The inscription reflects two aspects of miniature presentation, the traditions of honoring political loyalty and of exchanging tokens between friends.

The friendship between Jackson and Livingston was forged in New Orleans. They had first met in Washington, D.C., while serving together in the House of Representatives during the 1790s. They renewed their acquaintance 20 years later when Jackson came to New Orleans to prepare for the defense of the city against the British in 1814. Livingston, now an established leader in the Louisiana Territory, served as Jackson's translator and later as his civilian aide-de-camp. Their political alliance, and friendship, would last until Livingston's death in 1836.

It has long been said that the invention of photography heralded the death of the miniature, but the relationship was neither simple nor one-sided. In 1839, William Henry Fox Talbot in England and Louis Daguerre in France perfected their individual techniques (using light-sensitized paper and silver-coated metal plate, respectively), shared them with the world, and began a revolution in image-making.

Samuel F. B. Morse introduced the daguerreotype to the United States later in 1839. The daguerreotype was nicknamed "the mirror with a memory" because it captured a reverse image upon a highly reflective base. Americans' joint love affair with highly realistic art and sophisticated technology led to the widespread adoption of the daguerreotype.

Painted and photographic portraiture remained integrally intertwined during the Nineteenth Century. Early photographers, many of whom were painters, relied on accepted artistic conceits when posing sitters. It is no coincidence that Morse had also worked as a miniaturist.

Daguerreotypists enshrined their work in a manner originally reserved for miniatures. Glass protected the delicate surface of the plate and was held in place by a gilded metal liner. All components were contained within a leather-covered case. When opening such a case today, one is never sure if one will find a daguerreotype or a watercolor on ivory inside.

Since the Colonial period, Americans had sought a hard, realistic quality in their portraits in marked contrast to the softer, more idealized portrayals that European sitters requested. The popularization of photography prompted an even more highly developed realism in painted portraits. In other words, the power of the camera affected the visual aesthetic of the mid-Nineteenth Century.

William J.H. Powell created an image of Washington Irving that he rendered in nearly every medium, including watercolor on ivory. In the prospectus for the lithographed version, he proudly alluded to the appropriation of the Brady Studios daguerreotype of Irving because "as a likeness, [it] was perfect, the genial character and peculiar play of the features being caught with inimitable fidelity."

Hybrid images in the collection of Historic Hudson Valley illustrate the interplay of brush and camera. Some early photographs received touches of hand coloring. At times it was simply a pink blush added to the cheeks of the sitter, but the application of even a hint of color suggested a painted portrait.

At first glance, it appeared that the artist S. Schreier copied existing photographs when he created miniatures of John Ross and Violetta Delafield and their sons. Examination under a strong microscope as part of conservation revealed a more complex story. Schreier printed a partial photographic image onto a light-sensitized section of ivory, which he then over painted.

By the time the Delafields commissioned their portraits during the second decade of the Twentieth Century, the miniature was largely obsolete. The creation of these special portraits is a truer reflection of John Ross Delafield's strong antiquarian interests rather than the flourishing of a once highly popular art form. While the American Society of Miniature Painters remained in existence from 1897 to 1965, in reality the battle against the photograph had long been lost. Miniatures came to represent a quaint, bygone era. The attributes they embodied were considered irrelevant, maudlin and trite during the Twentieth Century's machine age and era of modernism.

"Beloved Keepsakes: Miniatures In The Collection Of Historic Hudson Valley" is excerpted from the catalogue of the same name by Kathleen Eagen Johnson. It may be purchased at Historic Hudson Valley's gift shop for $4.95.

Both exhibition and catalogue were made possible by grants from the Robert Lehman and Henry Luce Foundations.

Philipsburg Manor is on Route 9 in Sleepy Hollow, N.Y. The museum is open everyday except Tuesday from 10 am until 5 pm. Telephone 914/631-8200.