The Sun.
London, England, 1865-06-02 00:00:00

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Exhibition of Miniatures at South Ken-
sington.

The Department of Science and Art, with the aid
of a committee of noblemen and gentlemen, known
as the hereditary possessors of works in MiniatUre,
or as connoisseurs and collectors, have in less than
three months got together such a collection of
Miniatures as has never before been assembled. The,
collection was opened for private view yesterday.
It includes more than 3,000 examples of-the highest
interest; in enamel; oil and water-colour, chalk and•
pencil, by the leading Miniaturists from the IGth
century down to the present day.
-England is rich beyond all other countries in such
works, and the internal quiet the country has en:-
joyed for the, last four centuries—only partially
broken as respects the succession to family wealth
-and honours even by the two revolutions which
England has gone through within that period—has
allowed of a continuous accumulation of these trea=
sures such as has been possible in no other country.
All the finest family collections seem to have been
freely opened to the Department of Art and the
committee ; and the masterpieces thus brought toge-
ther are displayed with admirable effect in • two of
the handsome rooms lately opened .at Kensington.
Considering the short time in which the collection
has been made, arranged, and catalogued, the
organizers of the exhibition deserve great credit for
the way in which they. have managed the business.
The only drawback of the collection—as we feel
painfully when called upon to give a notice of it on
the spur of the moment—is its abounding riches. It
is only possible to do justice to such an exhibition
after many. days' study, and the present notice, ne-
cessarily written after a few hours' examination, can
only be a the most cursory kind.
The great interest of the collection, apart from its
instructiveness to artists and thoSe who wish to make
a critical study of -miniature art, is historical. We
have here, in little, a gallery embracing almost every
notable figure in the social, political, and literary
life of England from the reign of Elizabeth,
and throwing light in a variety of ways upon man-
ners, family history, the relations of parties and per-
sons, the scandals, friendships, and fashions, which
makes up the warp and woof of the canvas on which
the historian works his larger pictures. The styles
of the successive schools of miniature reflect the
times as much as the personages painted. From the
earnest gravity, and unaffected, unadorned truth of
Holbein, whose intense grasp of character is as ap-
parent in the jewel-mounted card of three inches in
diameter as in the life-size canvass, we pass to the
dainty finish of Nicholas Hilliard, in whose marvel-
lous elaboration of dresses and ornaments we see the
influence of a Queen, whose feminine love of brave
apparel and manly beauty were as keen as if she had
not been one of the keenest politicians and most
active sovereigns who ever filled a throne, and thence
through the Olivers and Hoskins, on to the revival
of a graver and plainer taste, embodied inithe noble
heads of Cooper. The style that fitted the grim
times of the Commonwealth gradually disappears
to give place to the courtly grace of perriwigged
courtiers and the lavish display •of loose-robed
feminine charms by Petitot and the French school,
which was on the ascendant on the revolution
of 1688 ; and this again is succeded by the more
native strength of our early academicians, Hone
and Cotes, Meyer and Ozias Humfrey, and the
enamellers who worked after Reynolds, till the
affected and luscious"taste of the Regency culmi-
nates in Cosway, Smart, and Shelley, and gradu-
ally gives place to the familiar style of our own
Ross and Newton and the higher refinement of
Thorburn, Moira, and Wells.

And now the work of the miniature painter seems
to have been handed over to the sun, and the photo-
grapher appears likely soon to be the only painter in
little. If this collection does nothing else, it will show
how much such a consummation leaves to be re-
gretted. For we may here learn that art on a small
scale may be fine art in the truest sense of the term ;
and before some of these true Holbeins and Hil-
liards, and these inimitable Coopers—never equalled
by anything on the same scale for character and
largeness of style, and not surpassed, in these re-
spects, by the best portraits of Vandyke himself—.
we must admit that the mind as well as the hand of
the artist is just as necessary to produce fine minia-
ture portraiture as to paint fine historical pictures.
Among the richest cases and contributions in vari-
ous styles may be mentioned Lord Cremorne's (A)
for its enamels by Hurter, and its Petitots, father
and son, in which last, however, the collections of
Mr. John Jones, Mr. Holford, and the Due
d'Aumale are richer still ; those of Mr. Samuel Ad-
dington (3U4 to 319) for Antonio Mores, Hilliards,
and Coopers ; those of Mr. Magniac for Holbeins,
llilliards, and Mores ; those of Mr. Charles Polhin
and Mr. John Berners and the Duke of Devonshire
for portraits of the Cromwell family, and other nota-
bilities of the Commonwealth, many of them by
Cooper ; those of Mr. J. Heywood llawkins for
. .

small heads in oil of the 16th and 17th centuries,
some by Hoskins, Oliver, Jansen, Gerbier, and many

not to be identified with any particular painter, but

most of them of singular merit ; those of Lord Bos-
ton, for two Holbeins of the rarest quality (1,011
and 1,029), and a number of others, hardly inferior,
but too long to enumerate. Of family collections,

here are selections from the unrivalled miniature

gallery of the Duke of Damien* embracing all

styles of miniature art and all classes of notables

n the people painted ; from that of the Spencers,
_ _

remarkable for its value in illustration of the

Marlborough family and its branches, and of the
whole Spencer connexion; of the Duke of Richmond

and the Earl of Abingdon ; of the Earl of Gosford,

of equal interest for illustration of art and the

family history; of Mr. Alexander Trotter, contain-

ing such curious "Jacobite relics" as the portraits
_ _

by Sir Robert Strange of the young Chevalier, the
Countess of Albany, and Cardinal York, of his own

wife and children, his wife's father, Mr. William
Lumsden, who was " out in the '45," and, in

strange juxtaposition with all these, the miniature
of George 111., taken when the Jacobite painter had
become a favourite engraver at Court.
Hopeless, at present, of giving anything like even
a comprehensive outline of all that is to be found of
especial value in these 3,000 minatures, we may
refer to single examples of such interest as the por-

trait of Charles I. (1,064), set in the King's hair,
dipped in blood on the scaffold, an heirloom in the
Shelly family, and which belonged to John Winck-
ley, executed at Lancaster Castle with the Earl of

Der wenwater after the rising of 1715. On the back
of this relic are engraved the names of the family,
who rose again far the Stuarts in 1745, and the
Dowager Lady Shelley, to whom it was be peathed
by 1.! er father, a Winckley of Brockholes, or Lancas-
ter, remembers to have worn it when a child on some
Jacobite anniversary about 1790. Against this we
may
m set the miniature, after Cooper, in enamel, a
(351), presented by him to his daughter,
with General
authentic
Cromwell
pfßrorerittdorganei Cromwell,ttsoft(332),he
arndo t
eoacnt
joihru,emir
nbeeirti marriagedo
ifincluding other
the Crewe one,
left by Sir Joshua Reynolds to Burke. Here, lent
by Miss Ouvry, is the miniature of Emma, Lady
Hamilton, taken from the neck of Nelson after his

death. Here (987 and 988), side by side, from the
hand of the same painter, Isabey-, hang Napoleon
and the Duke of Wellington, contributed by Lord
Cowley ; and a little further on, the portraits of
Louis Napoleon and the Empress Eugdnie, presented
to Lord Cowley by the Emperor, in commemoration
of the Congress of Paris in 1856. And here, lent by
Captain D. Damar, M.P., is a curious series of re-
cords from the hand of Cosway of an ill-fated and

ill-requited attachment—portraits of Mrs. Fitzher-
bert and the Prince ; miniatures of her eye and his,
once, no doubt, interchanged, and their wedding
ring, with the name of George Augustus Frederick,

engraved within the hoop.
We have said enough to indicate, and we can at
present do no more than indicate, the extraordinary
wealth and interest of this collection, which will, no
doubt, form one of the chief art attractions of the
season, and which reflects th e highest credit on all con-
cernedin getting it together and arranging it.— Tim es

CRYSTAL PALACE.—At the Opera Concert to-
morrow Mille. Dina de Murska and the artistes of her Ma-
jesty's Theatre take part. The solo pianist is Rorr Alfred
Jaen. .The concert -takes place at three. Before the concert
there will be a display of the upper fount4hl9, tula aster it
the usual afternoon proineuado,