Portrait Miniatures From Scottish Private Collections
Until October 29; Scottish National Portrait Gallery, Edinburgh

They say size isn’t everything, but there’s not much of a sense of event on the top floor of the Portrait Gallery. If a wall text didn’t announce the presence of the portrait miniatures exhibition, you might miss it altogether. There amongst the large-scale oil paintings of Mary Queen of Scots, David Hume, and Bonny Prince Charlie, lurk glass cabinets crammed with pocket-sized personages.

It’s as if whole rooms in the gallery had been shrunk down into glass cases, dozens of grand portraits reduced in size but not in detail. Horace Walpole once said of 17th century miniaturist, Samuel Cooper, that “If a glass could expand Cooper’s pictures to the size of Vandyck’s they would appear to have been painted for that proportion.”

The Portrait Gallery has been churning out shows of portrait miniatures over the last few years, as part of a determined campaign to raise the genre’s profile. While previous shows highlighted the gallery’s own collection, and entire private collections, this show is the first to cherry pick from 20 private lenders across Scotland.

The show boasts a newly discovered Henry Raeburn miniature, lost to art historians for over a century; a member of the public brought their miniature into the gallery recently to see if the sitter could be identified. He turned out to be Andrew Wood, an Edinburgh surgeon of the 1770s, and one of only six known miniatures by the leading Scottish painter.

Four of the Raeburn miniatures are in this show, looking strangely like the work of two different artists. Raeburn trained as a goldsmith under Edinburgh jeweller James Gilliland, and these early miniatures show his great promise as a painter. Gilliland and his wife, Elizabeth, are both portrayed in a flat, linear style, while the softly modelled figures of Andrew Wood and George Sandilands suggest a greater sense of mass.

It wasn’t unusual for miniature painters to start out as jewellers – the most famous exponent, Nicholas Hilliard, was a goldsmith, until Flemish miniaturist, Levina Teerlinc, taught him her secrets in the English royal court. There are seven female artists in this show, dating as far back as 1710, a treat that most traditional painting shows can’t offer. Miniature painting was clearly considered an acceptable pursuit for ladies.

Perhaps that’s because of its intimate, private nature. Miniatures were usually oval in shape, intended to be hung in a locket, close to the owner’s heart. Queen Charlotte and George III wore miniatures at their coronation in 1730, and exactly a century later, George IV insisted on wearing one to his grave.

It’s this personal nature which makes portrait miniatures so hard to appreciate in an exhibition setting. Lined up in cabinets, each assigned a number, these once-treasured objects are now mute about their own private histories. One was made after the death of its subject in a duel, another is of a king’s mistress, and yet another portrays a man who fought with Bonny Prince Charlie, painted by a man who would later die in a lunatic asylum. Once invested with such emotional attachment, they are like butterflies on pins, whose captions can only touch on the passions which once fluttered around them.

Around the time that photography became accessible, miniatures started to grow in a desperate attempt to compete. Cabinet miniatures, now rectangular and far too big to wear, took on the attributes of full-scale oil paintings. But their demise was inevitable, and by the mid-19th century, the portrait miniature was a thing of the past. Here in the 21st century, if the Portrait Gallery is to pull them back out of the past, it needs to start looking for that elusive magic formula.

Catrìona Black, Sunday Herald 23.07.06