I came across an interesting illustrated article today from JSTOR online, about the 18th century minaturist David Boudon. The article is: “A Most Perfect Resemblance at Moderate Prices: The Miniatures of David Boudon,”  by Nancy E. Richards, The Winterthur Portfolio, Vol. 9, pp 77-101, Henry Francis du Pont Winterthur Museum, 1974.  An excerpt from the article (which can be downloaded as a PDF for a fee) reads:

“Overshadowed by such well-known miniature portraitists as Elouis, Saint-Memin, Edward Malbone, and the Peales, David Boudon’s contribution to American miniature painting deserves reappraisal. His career serves as a good barometer of artistic practice in the 1790s and 1800s. His periodic migrations from place to place in search of commissions provide insight into the difficulties encountered by many of his contemporaries. Working in a little-used technique, Boudon was able to capture an accurate likeness without using a physiognotrace or pantograph. An excellent draftsman, his portraits are uncompromising; he does not try to glamorize or idealize his sitters. Working in a highly competitive field, Boudon’s patrons were members of the gentry–a segment of society frequently overlooked by artists in search of more prestigious clients. Boudon is not a major figure in the history of American miniature painting, but by providing an accurate record of middle and upper middle-class Americans at a reasonable price, Boudon anticipated the need for true likenesses that photography would satisfy later in the nineteenth century.”

One of the most rewarding aspects of being a specialist dealer  in portrait miniatures is placing pieces with descendants of the artists or sitters. Recently I had the pleasure of selling a signed miniature of an actress by the rare British artist Thomas Heaphy to a direct descendant of Heaphy.  Heaphy’s works come onto the market very, very infrequently. One other signed portrait miniature by him, very similar to the one I sold, can be seen on the blog http://portraitminiature.blogspot.com , which showcases an outstanding private collection. The link to the page is: http://bit.ly/5aAMp5  (#1801).

The new owner of my Heaphy miniature commented: “Unfortunately I haven’t any pictures of Thomas Heaphy himself , but this picture entitled “The Poultry Seller,” which exhibited at the Old Watercolour Society, 1810, no. 235,  bears an uncanny resemblance to at least three members of my father’s family, and I wonder if it might be Thomas himself, or his father.

I have in my possession a miniature by Thomas Heaphy’s wife Mary Stevenson. It is inscribed as “a portrait of a gentleman by Miss Stevenson /83 Charlotte Street/Rathbone Place” and underlined, Mr Brown. To my untrained eye I would suggest that Mary Stevenson was a more accomplished artist than Thomas himself. It has been suggested to me by a knowledgeable art historian that her work may have been on occasion have been put up for sale as Thomas’s work. This begs the question as to how Mary managed to accumulate the vast sum of £1250 on her death, as very few,  if any, women artists were recognised at this time.”

The Poultry Seller

An Actress, Signed by Thomas Heaphy, Circa 1800

The artist’s biography is as follows:

Thomas Heaphy (1775-1835), born in London, was articled to an engraver, and then became a pupil of John Boyne, who ran a drawing school and was a friend of artist James Holmes. Heaphy exhibited at the Royal Academy, the British Institute, the Society of British Artists, the Old Water Colour Society and the New Water Colour Society. He executed oil portraits, watercolor portraits, miniatures, genre subjects, and colored prints. In 1803 he became the portrait painter to the Prince of Wales. In 1812 he went to the Penisula and followed the army, painting portraits of British officers, including a portrait of the Duke of Wellington with his General Staff, which was much admired. He became the first president of the Society of British Artists in 1824.

A copy of his will dated February 2, 1835, naming him as an artist in water colours, at 8 St. John’s Wood Road, St. Marylebone, included reference to 1250 pounds from his first wife, Mary (nee Stevenson, also an artist), which was to be left to his second wife, Harriet Jane, and included letters of administration to Harriet Jane Heaphy, widow. All four of his children: Charles Heaphy, Mary Ann Heaphy, Thomas Frank Heaphy and Elizabeth Murray (nee Heaphy) went on to become artists. Mary Ann specialized in miniatures. She married a portrait painter named W. Musgrave in 1832, and exhibited after that date as Mrs. Musgrave.

A miniature of a man signed “T. Heaphy, 1815,” and a miniature of a lady signed “T.H. 1803″ on the front and in full on the reverse, are in the Victoria Albert Museum. Examples of his work are also in the National Portrait Gallery and the Tate Collection, London. A monography on Heaphy by W.T. Whitley was published in 1933 by the Royal Society of British Artist’s Art Club.

The following anecdote about portrait miniatures recently appeared on the blog “Artists and Ancestors”  (http://portmin.blogspot.com/):

“I will leave you with a story that I was told just a few days ago. A man, very old today, remembers visiting in his grandfather’s jewellery store in Manhattan during the depression. The man remembers people bringing in scraps of metal to be sold for pennies.  And he remembers being just tall enough that he was eye to eye with a large jar his grandfather kept on a table. And the jar was full of little faces.  The faces of miniatures which were discarded for the small amount of the precious metal would bring.  All those tiny bits of art, lost to the world.”

The philosophy of collecting and collections is something that always interests me, and I thought that a quote from Orlando Rock, Christie’s head of Private Collections, illustrated a facet of this.

“What makes the perfect collection?  The key is not to be too old-fashioned and to have a few masterpieces which stand out, around which groups can be coherently formed. But above all, a collection needs to have charm and be full of character; it very rarely works if it is bland or unimaginative. and in an ideal world, added into this mix would be a touch of glamour:  The allure of the cult of the personality….for me, every work of art tells a story–and it is the romance of the object, where it comes from, who commissioned it and who owned it subsequently–that is at the heart of what we do. “

The following poem was written by Reverend Charles Symmons about a portrait miniature of his wife, Elizabeth Foley, painted by Samuel Cotes.

I recently sold a signed miniature of a baby by Elsie Dodge Pattee (Augur) to her grand-daughter, who shared some information on her grandmother. The grand-daughter has Pattee’s autobiography, a large oil that was a Beaux Arts entry, and some late paintings. She says about Pattee:

“I can’t wait to show your miniature to my older sister Alison, who might be the baby in question, but the photo doesn’t look like another miniature we have of her. Alison, b. 1936, is five years older than I am, and is probably one of the last subjects Nana painted. Her retina detached before I was born and she didn’t pick up a brush again for at least twenty years, when another cousin, himself an artist, bought her oils and canvases, saying “Here, paint big!” In the interim, she taught history of art to all the kids in the neighborhood, in Old Lyme where she lived and we summered, and in Ossining NY, where we lived and she wintered. I’ve been through Egyptian, Greek and Roman art several times and have a lifelong love of art in general and those periods in particular. Nana also started to teach me drawing – as she had learned it, starting with charcoal and properly shading an egg – and my greatest regret is that I didn’t do more with her using more vivid colors later in her career. I spent a lot of time with her in the last decade of her life – late ‘60’s, early 70’s – just as I was getting involved in the Women’s Movement. We talked a lot about her life as, essentially, a single, independent, professional woman, which is what I was and am. “Nana, were you involved with the suffragists?” “No, I was too busy working for a living.”

This is a pastel portrait of Elsie done by husband Elmer (E. E. Pattee). He, too was an artist. In fact, I think they met in art school. However, because he ‘wanted to paint the way he wanted to paint,’ and because he had a family to support, he started the Paris American Art Store. It still exists, within walking distance of the Louvre. Attached is the companion self-portrait by Elmer. i’m not sure of the date, but the both look very young, so they were probably done around 1902ish. [see images below]. “

Upon querying if Elsie Pattee was related to John Wood and Edward Dodge, the grand-daughter replied:

“If the families were related there is no genetic connection because my grandmother was adopted; family lore has it from a Chelsea MA housepainter. His wife died, Nana was an infant and he couldn’t care for her, so she was adopted by Emma Harper Dodge and her husband, Mr. Dodge (whose given name I can’t remember. I do remember that he was an alcoholic and he never worked.) Emma was an offshoot of the Harper publishing company, and the family moved to Paris when Elsie was very young because a modest income went much farther in France than in America.”

A biography of Elsie Dodge Pattee is as follows:

Elsie S. Dodge Pattee (1876- c. 1975 ) was one of the leading miniature artists of her era. Born Elsie Stuart Dodge in Chelsea, Massachusetts, she studied at the Academie Julian in Paris, where she most likely met her husband Elmer Ellsworth Pattee, a painter and sculptor, She gave birth to their son, John Robert Pattee, and then apparently the family moved to New York, where she established her career painting landscapes and marine paintings, and specializing in portrait miniatures. Pattee exhibited at the National Academy of Design, the Brooklyn Society of Artists, the Lyme Art Association, the Mystic Art Association, the Art Institute of Chicago, the Panama Pacific Exhibition of 1915, and the Paris Salon. Along with Lucia Fairchild Fuller and Mabel R. Welch, she was one of the three regular instructors at the American School of Miniature Painters for the years 1913 to 1916, and was a member of the American Society of Miniature Painters. She died in Old Lyme, Connecticut in 1975. Her works may be found at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the  Smithsonian Museum of Art, the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, and the Brooklyn Museum of Art, among others.

Thomas Seir Cummings (1804-1894) wrote “Works in miniature should possess the same beauty of composition, correctness of drawing, breadth of light and shade, brilliancy, truth of colour, and firmness of touch, as works executed on a larger scale.”

Archibald Robertson (1765-1835)  is a well-known miniaturist, but few may know of his wife, Eliza Robertson, nee Abramse (1776-1865.).  Robertson and his brother Alexander emigrated from Scotland to America, and together set up the Columbian Academy of Painting, one of the earliest schools in America. Eliza Abramse was one of his students, and became a talented amateur artist, exhibiting several times at the American Academy of Fine Arts.  Eliza came from an old Dutch family,  one of the original settlers of New York,  their homestead located in Wall Street.  Archibald and Eliza married in 1794, and had six sons and four daughters. 

The Henry Luce III Center for the Study of American Culture has a self-portrait miniature by Eliza Robertson, as well as a miniature of her painted by her husband, which was part of the exhibition Tokens of Affection: The Portrait Miniature in America , at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the National Museum of American Art, and the Art Institute of Chicago in 1991. The Center also has a self-portrait miniature by Archibald Robertson, and a miniature painted by Archibald of their son Anthony Lispenard Robertson. Anthony was a noted jurist, serving as assistant vice-chancellor of the State of New York in 1846-48 and as surrogate judge of New York County in the latter year. In 1859 he was elected a judge of the superior court of New York City and in 1866 was chosen chief justice, an office he held until his death two years later.

Information compiled from the Center’s catalogue text for the miniatures, as well as from The Century Illustrated Monthly Magazine, May 1890 to October 1890, Volume XL.  

An interesting quote on Robert Field:

Robert Field’s miniature of Charles Carnan Ridgely Jr., painted in 1800 while the artist was en route from Philly to Washington, shows [the boy] at the age of sixteen…scholar Harry Piers commented: “It is Field’s only known portrait of so young a lad.” Indeed, for reasons unknown, the artist seems to have painted children only on very rare occasions. In general, teenage boys were relatively infrequent subjects for portrait miniatures, which often commemorated rites of passage Past the threat of childhood disease and too young for marriage, adolescents were in an awkward transitional state that apparently few parents of the time desired to record in this most intimate art form.

–Page 175, Aronson, Julie, and Wieseman, Marjorie E. Perfect Likeness: European and American Portrait Miniatures from the Cincinnati Art Museum, Yale University Press, 2006.

An article found on-line, from Alan Derbyshire, Senior Conservator at the Victoria and Albert Museum, below, comments on handling portrait miniatures.  You can find further advice on handling portrait miniatures from Jerry Litamer, a specialist conservator in miniatures,  at Wiebold Studio in Terrace Park, Ohio.

“Collections of portrait miniatures often contain a variety of materials e.g. watercolour on ivory and/or vellum, oil on copper, enamels, small works on paper, metal and wooden frames etc. Therefore practical recommendations need to be quite general. However I would first point out that ‘the miniature’ should be considered as the painting and its frame/locket which should be kept together as a unit. If there are inscriptions inside, these should be photographed and noted. Many miniatures are damaged due to people
crudely opening lockets and not knowing how to reseal them. This allows dust and dirt to readily enter and also makes safe handling very risky. Watercolour on ivory miniatures in particular can be
readily damaged by touching with sweaty fingers or from breathing on them.

The miniatures can be stored in drawers lined with an inert foam e.g. Plastazote into which holes can be cut to hold the miniatures securely against vibration. This can double up for display with aesthetic refinement but there is then the problem of how to limit light exposure. Miniatures tend to be very light sensitive and therefore exposure must be limited either by curtains or timer switches.

Temperature and Relative Humidity should be around the 19 plus or minus 1 degrees C and 50% plus or minus 5% mark-the important thing is to keep conditions as stable as possible-ivory is very hygroscopic. One should consider treating miniatures which are strongly warped as a precaution against cracking. Ivory can be flattened and/or wooden frames can be built out to help accommodate them.

If treatment is not an option because of financial restraint etc then handling should be restricted where miniatures are loose and strongly warped miniatures should not be forced back into their frames.”

Alan Derbyshire
Senior Conservator
Victoria and Albert Museum
London
England