Little enough

WAM's miniature portraits are a squinter's wonderland

by Leon Nigrosh

FINE AND FOLK TRADITIONS IN AMERICAN MINIATURE PAINTING At the Worcester Art Museum, 55 Salisbury Street, through May, 1999.

Everything about this exhibition of miniature paintings is small -- even the gallery. Recently renamed in honor of local collector and docent Marianne E. Gibson, the entire space is little more than five by eight feet. Because it is nestled in a corner of one of the larger gallery foyers and kept in complete darkness, the casual visitor might easily pass by this modest exhibit of only 12 watercolor-on-ivory miniatures. But as you step into the closet gallery, motion detectors activate low-level lighting that illuminates the two unpretentious showcases protecting these diminutive masterpieces.

WAM has more than 90 such miniature portrait paintings in its permanent collection, but because of their sensitivity to light and humidity, only a few ivories are put out for display at a time, in rotation. The little works currently on display, however, haven't been seen here before; they're new arrivals at WAM, on loan from an anonymous private collector.

Portrait miniatures have been used since ancient times on coins and, later, on illuminated manuscripts, but the process of painting them on ivory was developed in England during the reign of Henry VIII. These early works were known as "limnings," or small illuminations. The term "miniature" originally referred to the use of minium, a pigment involving red lead, used in decorative painting. It was only after the dawn of the 18th century that the term took on the connotation of size.

Just why this type of portraiture became so popular in America in the early 1800s (and persisted well into the 1930s) is hard to figure. Only rarely did the purported artists truly have the skills to use such a difficult technique. And it was rarer still that a miniature painter captured his subject's true likeness. Most likely, they were popular for sentimental reasons -- as personalized brooches and pendants and such that acted as constant reminders of loved ones.

One of the tiniest ivories on display at WAM is the two-inch oval portrait of Prudence Eustis Amory, painted by Nathaniel Hancock on the occasion of her marriage, in 1792. An immigrant from England, Hancock was adept at producing images of soft-featured females by combining stippling and cross-hatching techniques as he built up transparent layers of watercolor pigments. The young lady in question is shown posing demurely in a pale blue dress with a large ruffled collar, along with meticulously delineated garlands in her expansively flowing hair. As was the fashion of the time, a small lock of her real hair is set under glass in the underside of the gold locket.

Man of the Van Rensselaer Family is a believable portrait painted by Thomas Seir Cummings in 1844. The gentleman is shown wearing a blue cap with gold braids and tassel, which compliments his blue cloak fitted with intricate embroidery. The entire ensemble is accented with a red cravat. Cummings's handling of the various fabric textures along with a sensitive working of facial features combine to make a creditable rendition of the sitter.

In the work titled William Henry Baldrey, we see a portrait of a child painted to commemorate his untimely passing at 10 months of age. This stylized work, completed in 1851 by Clarissa Peters Russell, employs a typical 19th-century symbolic image of a bird in the boy's hand to suggest the spirit that recently left the subject's body.

One of the images in this display, titled generically Portrait of a Man, painted by John Ritto Penniman, in 1825, has just been donated to the museum. Penniman was a local artist who lived in nearby Hardwick and attempted to make his living doing everything from sign painting to decorative painting on furniture, landscapes, and oil portraiture. He was also an excellent miniaturist, as this small but lively example attests. WAM is fortunate to have gained this item because visitors can now compare Penniman's tiny efforts with his eight-by-nine-inch oil painting of Edward Tuckerman executed in the popular cameo style of the 1820-'30s.

Two larger oil portraits of Henry and Elizabeth Nolen, hanging on permanent display in an adjacent gallery, show Penniman's exquisite brushwork and excellent rendition of skin tones in pink blushes with pale-blue undertones and natural-light highlights. With all of his innate skills, Penniman failed to make a decent living at his chosen trade(s), spent time in the poorhouse, and was eventually convicted for counterfeiting money. Perhaps his skill at portrait miniatures was not as well-tuned as he had hoped.

The Worcester Art Museum is open Wednesday through Sunday from 11 a.m. to 5 p.m. and on Saturday from 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. Call: 799-4406.