The 2008 exhibition that this catalogue accompanied was instigated by the British Museum’s acquisition of an important drawing by Sir Thomas Lawrence, Mary Hamilton (1789). Cover-girl of the catalogue and an astonishing tour-de-force by the gifted nineteen-year-old artist, this work reminded authors Stephen Lloyd and Kim Sloan of just how ubiquitous miniatures and portrait drawings were in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries—particularly at the Royal Academy—and how central they were to the contemporary debates on the purpose and significance of portraiture. As Lloyd (of the Scottish National Portrait Gallery) and Sloan (of the British Museum) admit, this publication only begins to address some of the pressing issues of the genre. Their goal is “to open up the discourse . . . looking at them as physical objects as well as symbolic ones, asking how and why they were made, commissioned, whether for pleasure or as gifts, where they were kept or hung or worn—displayed, encased or bejeweled” (9). Although it can be deemed only a partial success, the catalogue is nonetheless a beautiful, erudite, and informative publication.

The study and appreciation of British portraiture—particularly during its heyday in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century—has followed anything but a linear path. The paradox of Sir Joshua Reynold’s career—hugely successful portraitist, but denigrator of the genre—has rippled through the scholarship of succeeding centuries. Esteemed as the British art form par excellence, portraiture has also been used as the exemplar of the limitations of the British School. The elevation to Old Master status of Reynolds, Thomas Gainsborough, Henry Raeburn, and Thomas Lawrence among others in the late nineteenth century, thanks to adventurous dealers such as Joseph Duveen, has further muddied the waters. The compliant acquisition of such works (at prices never since replicated) by American collectors and museums, and the relative ubiquity of major British portraits in American collections today, demonstrates how the art market and aesthetics can never be understood in isolation. Add to this the sweeping generalizations of 1960s Marxist art history—portraiture as elitism—and the broader twentieth-century marginalization of elements of the genre, particularly miniatures and works on paper, as exclusively the domain of collectors and connoisseurs, and there exists an area of art-historical study that is surprisingly complicated.

In two substantial essays Lloyd and Sloan explore how the period in which Lawrence drew Mary Hamilton was one in which the genre underwent a significant re-evaluation. Demoted from prime position in the Great Room at the Royal Academy to a secondary series of galleries, miniatures and portrait drawings increasingly became viewed as a peripheral, decorative form of art—a pejorative view from which they have never recovered. This decline in esteem is well described in Lloyd’s opening essay, where he uses Horace Walpole’s elaborate “cabinet of miniatures and enamels” of 1743 (Victoria and Albert Museum) as a starting point for a history and analysis of the significance of the genre, from the gift-giving of Renaissance princes to the feminine sentimentality of the early Victorian era.

That such works possessed considerable significance to their owners is exemplified by Lloyd’s description of Laurence Sterne’s Journal to Eliza, a collection of letters written in 1767, in which Sterne “communes” with his beloved through the medium of a Richard Cosway miniature. Many accounts exist of this belief that the portrait, particularly when encapsulated in miniature, possessed actual attributes of the sitter and could act as a substitute for the person depicted. The exiled Stuart royal family (here represented by Maurice Quentin de la Tour’s 1748 pastel of either Prince Charles Edward Stuart or his brother Henry [Scottish National Portrait Gallery, cat. 38]) was a particularly effective user of portraits—paintings, miniatures, prints, and medals—for political and dynastic ends. The effectiveness with which they employed portraiture as a propaganda weapon reminds the reader of the extent to which modern art historians undervalue portrait media both aesthetically and sociologically.

Coinciding with this use of portraiture for political ends was the emergence of the cult of celebrity, another innovation that is both fascinating and misleading in a potentially teleological interpretation of the history of visual culture. Is George Dance’s 1793 drawing of the notorious cross-dressing Chevalier d’Eon (British Museum, cat.169) the equivalent or forerunner of a People magazine exposé? It is probably fair to say that prurient taste, gossip, and curiosity about the behavior of the rich or the famous has changed little, but it is misleading to suppose that there is any equivalence between an eighteenth-century portrait and a twenty-first-century paparazzi snapshot.

Of greater importance was the way in which portraits increasingly became seen as a way of embodying and memorializing both individual and national narratives. Sloan’s essay looks in detail at the ways miniatures and portrait prints were displayed in domestic interiors, particularly in aristocratic houses, and speculates on their use as a means of demonstrating their owner’s place within a social and historic structure. That many of these displays were in private or semi-private “closets,” and only exposed to those trusted or somehow “initiated” into the owner’s social network, further emphasizes their significance as powerful societal totems, rather than baubles or frippery. The parallel emergence of a series of narrative histories of England in which individuals—and their portraits—took prominence offers further insight into the way in which portraiture, and, more importantly, looking at portraits, became central to the emergence of nineteenth-century British national identity. Numerous portrait series were initiated in the early nineteenth century—notably Dance’s “Academical” and “Eminent” Heads (1808), and Thomas Cadell and William Davies’s British Gallery of Contemporary Portraits (1822). It is no coincidence that the movement to establish national portrait galleries in both London and Edinburgh gathered pace in the first half of the nineteenth century. The charge was led by Thomas Carlyle who, as Lloyd explains, strongly believed that a decent portrait was better than “half-a-dozen written biographies” (23).

A challenge that Sloan wisely emphasizes is present scholars’ relative inability to determine precisely how miniatures and drawings were displayed. John Carter’s 1788 watercolor of Walpole’s cabinet is rightly given prominence as one of only a few near contemporary depictions of how such works were displayed. Many current installations—such as those at Malahide Castle in Ireland—may reflect the historicizing, or feminizing, tastes of subsequent generations and, as such, may have further reinforced the perception of the primarily decorative qualities of these works to contemporary art historians and collectors.

A theme that persists throughout this study is that the subject under examination is fighting against the tide of history, or at least the tide of taste. If demotion from the Great Room at the Royal Academy in the 1790s was not enough, it is revealed that by the 1820s portrait drawing was considered of such inferior status that Lawrence point-blank refused to participate in Cadell and Davies’s project, unwilling to associate with a medium now considered “mechanical” and unworthy of an artist of note, other than as preparatory medium for a more complete work. This diminution of the genre coincided with the emergent sentimentality of a Victorian culture that favored a feminized reading of such objects. The Victorian obsession with death adds another dimension to their response to these images. The portrayal of facial details, notably eyes, and the inclusion of locks of hair in the casing or framework of mid-nineteenth-century miniatures places them in the social interiors of Victorian life as yet another bibelot in a cluttered domestic interior.

The Intimate Portrait: Drawings, Miniatures and Pastels from Ramsay to Lawrence is an important publication that should encourage broad-ranging scholarly study like that in this catalogue, rather than the highly specialized type that has hitherto characterized the literature. Lloyd and Sloan reveal the richness of material available, and the design of the catalogue does it full justice. A sole caveat is the decision to restrict the exhibition to works from the collections of the two participating museums. Understandable for financial reasons, it does result in some areas of weakness, particularly in the final section on “The Art of Celebrity.” Few of those included—the Chevalier d’Eon excepted—are notable celebrities, and so a full evaluation of what is arguably one of the most interesting areas of the subject can only be partial at best. Still, the bulk of the material is dealt with elegantly and with erudition. The catalogue offers a basis for much future scholarship.