Once Upon Our Time: Portrait Miniatures by Moyna Flannigan
Until September 5, Scottish National Portrait Gallery

Portrait Miniatures from the National Galleries of Scotland
Until September 5, Scottish National Portrait Gallery

The thing with portrait miniatures is that – well – they’re small. You can mount a major exhibition of locket-sized paintings and still run the risk that people will walk right past. After three years of annual portrait miniature exhibitions, the Portrait Gallery has cracked the problem with a double exhibition offering a fresh way into the genre.

Contemporary Scottish artist Moyna Flannigan has devoted her career to painting full-length portraits of quirky fictional characters in flat, pastel-coloured spaces. Inspired by the gallery’s exhibitions of portrait miniatures, she has scaled down her working methods to create fifty bijou masterpieces of her own.

Flannigan’s works are in a discreet, modern-looking space, arranged neatly in rectangular frames around the walls. This comes as a bit of a disappointment if you’re hoping to see them displayed in the manner of the real thing, in jewel-like cases or covered with flaps of luxurious velvet.

On the other hand the real thing, shown in the adjacent space, is less enticing. Four tall dark wood cases, five flat cabinets, and a variety of framed items around the walls create a museumesque clutter which is staid in comparison with the freshness of Flannigan’s display.

To recreate the authentic look, Flannigan learned how to paint on vellum, and the result is beautifully luminous. Using a limited palette for each portrait she has brushed hastily into the drying surface, creating a porcelain-like clarity. These loose brush strokes set her paintings apart from the finely worked miniatures in the gallery’s collection. Fine detail was essential in those days, before photography was available to provide perfect likenesses of your loved ones.

What Flannigan does best is to create character types which make you want to know more. Haughty old women in flouncy dresses are displayed alongside romantic young men with high collars and big eyes, children who might be asleep or dead, and heavily-made up drama queens with wigs and adam’s apples.

Imagination is the key. The artist has collaborated with local writer Dilys Rose to create a beautiful book which tells the fictional story of 11 of her characters. Inspired by this, you’ll begin to see the old portrait miniatures with new eyes, and before you know it you’ll be making up your own stories.

These are caricatures which owe something to music-hall and cabaret. They are like gaudy beads threaded along a tense string. They are “part Carry On, part Pinter”, according to the exhibition catalogue, and tellingly they bear more than a passing resemblance to the historic portrait miniatures in nearby display cases. Flannigan has picked up not only on the expressions on the faces of the traditional sitters, but also on their costumes and postures. There is something in the personality of the painters too which she has distilled, magnifying the nuances of humour which are sometimes detectable in the old portraits.

Not only do her characters seem to be playing a theatrical role (often with high camp), but Flannigan herself seems to be dressing up as a portrait miniaturist. She is relishing the role of limner, and you can almost imagine her wearing Archibald Skirving’s hat while she brushes away furiously at her vellum.

Catrìona Black, Sunday Herald 13.06.04