Attributed to Charles Willson Peale

MENTOR GRAVURES

THE revival of miniature painting in America in the last twenty-five years has awakened interest in its past history. The installation in the Metropolitan Museum of Art of the comprehensive collection of miniatures owned by the estate of the late J. Pierpont Morgan has no doubt done much to increase this, and inspire the purchase and gifts of examples by American painters, for the Museum collection, that are now on permanent exhibition there.

Just when the art had its beginning has never been definitely determined, but its evolution from the portrait painting in illuminated manuscripts and parchments of the fourteenth, fifteenth and sixteenth centuries is generally accepted. In these, small heads and portraits were painted into the text and often in the first letter of the first word of a paragraph. This was extensively practiced in Italy, where this work assumed a necessarily religious character, being executed almost exclusively in the monasteries, for ecclesiastical use.

Minium, the Latin name for a red mineral coloring matter, was the pigment used by the early scribes for the initial letters and headings of these manuscripts. Thus, the term "miniatura" generally came to be applied to these portraits, which later became known as "miniatures." Miniature painting on ivory, or paintings "in little," as they have been called, gradually developed into a "personal" art, because of their peculiar appeal to the sentiments and affections, and for their "companionable proportions." They were often framed in black wood, usually in gold, however, sometimes mounted in jewels or set in a locket that could be readily worn on a chain or ribbon about the neck, or kept in intimate touch upon the dressing table or desk. In them the fashions and vanities of costume and head-dress of all periods have been recorded in the daintiest and most minute detail.

GENERAL PHILIP SCHUYLER, BY JOHN TRUMBULL
In the possession of the New York Historical Society

The history of miniature painting, however, is not complex—the methods and materials being much the same throughout its development or decline. The art is largely confined to the simple portrayal of heads, with only occasional contributions of fanciful subjects. Were it not, therefore, for the changes of fashion, one would have difficulty in remembering the painters, and an approach to monotony would result.