Significant collections of American miniatures are owned by New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Smithsonian American Art Museum in Washington, DC, the Philadelphia Museum of Art, the Worcester Art Museum in Massachusetts, the Yale University Art Museum in New Haven, CT, and the Gibbes Museum of Art in Charleston, SC. While some of these institutions have produced catalogues, relatively few publications exist that discuss the portrait and mourning miniatures in their own and others’ collections. Art-history monographs and dissertations on American miniaturists are even more rare, save for those on Benjamin West, John Singleton Copley, Charles Fraser, and Charles Willson Peale and his artistic family, wherein their miniatures are discussed within the context of their entire oeuvre. Recently, the miniature has been embraced, rather, by scholars of American history and material culture, a notable example being Anne Verplanck’s dissertation, “Facing Philadelphia: The Social Functions of Silhouettes, Miniatures, and Daguerreotypes, 1760-1860” (1996), for the American Studies Program at the College of William and Mary in Williamsburg, VA.

The paucity of art-historical studies is redressed by Robin Jaffee Frank, who, as Associate Curator of American Painting and Sculpture at the Yale University Art Gallery, is in a unique position to treat a total of 146 miniatures from public and private collections. In Love and Loss: American Portrait and Mourning Miniatures, most of the works considered are from Yale’s own superb collection, including the substantial, promised bequest of Davida Tenenbaum Deutsch and Alvin Deutsch. Cleverly designed in a seven by five and one-half inch format “that responds so sympathetically to the small scale and private purpose of miniatures” (xi)—many of which are reproduced life-size, lending a special intimacy to her subject–her study serves as the catalogue of the exhibition of the same title that she organized for the gallery. In his Forward, Jock Reynolds, the gallery’s former director, sets the tone for Frank’s work by describing it as “the first book and exhibition to fully explore the strong ties between the history of the miniature and American private life” (vii). This claim is eminently borne out by Frank’s text where—through an introduction and seven chapters, followed by separate sections of detailed endnotes and a checklist of illustrations—a historical presentation of the material, covering the height of miniatures’ popularity from 1760 to ca. 1840 as both public display and private devotion, is combined with biographical investigations of the artists and the sitters, discussions of technique and analyses of style, and, finally, the genre’s confrontation and coexistence with photography.

Frank fully acknowledges her indebtedness to earlier scholars’ publications on American portrait miniatures, including those of Theodore Bolton, Robin Bolton-Smith, William Dunlap, Davida Tenenbaum Deutsch, John Hill Morgan, Martha R. Severens, and Harry B. Wehle. The work of these and others’ are fully cited in the substantial section of endnotes, but Frank has brought her own extensive research and fresh approach to her subject.

Frank does not limit her approach to a single methodological perspective. Rather, she combines formal analysis with history and biographical research on the sitters and artists based on well-known information as well as the use of primary sources, such as letters. Rising well above mere pastiche, her text embraces numerous methodologies in order to view her material within the history of portraiture, as material objects, and as evidence of changing economic and social conditions. By broadening rather than narrowing her approach, Frank makes an important contribution to this eclectic but specialized field of study. Nevertheless, Frank is forced to conclude that in spite of her extensive discussion of American portrait and mourning miniatures, in the end, the “very function of miniatures as familial and loving tokens frustrates an evaluation of their importance in the evolution of portraiture, material culture, and social history in America” (303). This situation is exacerbated by the objects’ small size, private function, fragility, and portability; many of them are now lost or damaged. It is, nevertheless, these very elements that preserve such rich personal histories of the sitters, the technical expertise of the artists, and the stylistic variations. It is rare to find a scholar reaching a conclusion that essentially vitiates his or her initial premises and modes of inquiry; it is even more rare to find this sort of conclusion in print. Frank might have arranged her material and arguments in ways that might have resulted in unequivocal conclusions, but she didn’t. It is a testimony to her intellectual integrity that she provides a detailed and clearly written study of her material from varying perspectives but admits that her text is not definitive. It takes courage to admit that considering one’s comprehensive approach, the material itself does not lend itself to watertight, conclusive clarity.

Frank begins by discussing the origins and precedents for New World miniatures. Inherited by the American colonists, the European miniature (limnings) tradition evolved from medieval manuscript illumination. In fact, the word miniature derives from the name of the red lead ink, minium, used to decorate manuscripts, and was a reference to technique rather than size. Even though the miniature has its roots in France and Flanders, the portrait miniature became more of a unique art form in England than on the Continent, possessing a continuous, 400-year history on the island. In addition, the miniature can best be seen and understood in relationship to the European portrait tradition—so well seen in America, and later England, in the work of West, Copley, Stuart, and Peale—and to the later development of photography (daguerreotypes), which at first caused its transformation and then eventual demise. But throughout her text, Frank makes it clear that the “portrait miniature stands apart from any other art form in its highly personal associations” (1), as a sentimental token of love and mourning, saturated with meanings.

Frank emphasizes that portrait miniatures held a unique place in American art and social history and that their development from ca. 1740 to ca. 1840 reflects the change in attitudes toward marriage and the family in general, with miniatures being increasingly commissioned by the gentry and the middle class rather than the aristocracy. She does so with lengthy discussions of changing patrons, sitters (alive or dead), and iconography. Although many miniaturists did not sign their work, Frank has “endeavored to give back to these miniatures what has been torn from them—-the ties of family, friends, authorship, and place that originally brought them into being. Rediscovering the identities of artists and sitters and understanding the personal associations that miniatures commemorate return to them their power to move us” (13). The works she has chosen and her thoroughly informative discussions of them amply demonstrate that Frank has accomplished her task.

While most of the works were done in major metropolitan centers such as Boston, New York, Philadelphia, Washington, DC, and Charleston, SC, the itinerant nature of this genre helped produce miniatures from many other locales. Besides discussions of West, Copley, Stuart, and Peale, Frank provides significant treatments of lesser-known artists. Some of these include Nathaniel Hancock, working in the 1790s; John Ramage, whose work is concentrated in the 1780s but continued into the 1790s; and Pierre Henri. An especially interesting section is on artists during the United States’’ early decades—in particular, on the cult of George Washington, which produced many miniatures of him and his wife, Martha. Concentrating on this subject, Frank analyzes the work of Marquise Jean-François-René-Almaire de Bréhan (Anne Flore Millet), Samuel Folwell, James Peale, Robert Field, and William Russell.

The first three decades of the nineteenth century constitute the heyday of American miniatures, and Frank devotes two chapters to the medium’s creation, popularity, and significance. We are introduced to the increasingly adept and painterly work of Archibald and Walter Robertson, Benjamin Trott, William Dunlap, Edward Greene Malbone, William M. S. Doyle, Mary Way, Raphaelle and Anna Claypoole Peale, Anson Dickinson, Charles Fraser, Henry Inman, Thomas Seir Cummings, James Passmore Smith, and the remarkably intimate and unique work of Sarah Goodridge, who limned an image of her bare breasts as a gift to the statesman Daniel Webster. Photography began to compete with and eventually erode the market for miniatures during the 1840s and 50s, at a time when later miniaturists, such as Mrs. Moses B. Russell, George Hewitt Cushman, and John Henry Brown, were active.

Working on a very small scale, many of the artists created work that evinces remarkable dexterity and invention. Their formal qualities are wonderfully shown in the superb reproductions, many the exact size of the originals. Being particularly well-trained and encouraged, the members of the Peale dynasty created exceptional work, as did those artists who specialized in much larger portraits (e.g., Fraser and Inman), but they are not alone in their achievements. Especially between John Ramage in 1790 and Anson Dickinson in the mid-1830s, we encounter an abundance of talented artists of both genders, predominantly aware of past and present work in the genre, yet each exhibiting a distinctive, recognizable style. In spite of Frank’s own inconclusive findings, she has done a great service to all scholars of American art with her study of miniatures, considering her material from a variety of methodological avenues and presenting the visual material through excellent color images.