The Sun.
London, England, 1858-08-23 00:00:00

DIFFERENCE.

MINIATURES ON PHOTOGRAPHS.

PAINTED BY THOMAS CARRICK.
Everybody who is familiar with the Royal Aca-
demy Exhibitions for some years past is of course
perfectly well acquainted with the name and works
of Mr. Thomas Carrick, one of the most successful
and popular of living miniature painters. Several of
his more remarkable productions, when mentioned,
come vividly bAlire the mind's eye upon the instant—
they have been sofrequently and cleverly reproduced
in well-known engravings. There is that admirable
portrait of his of Lord John Russell—the most feli-
citous likeness ever yet produced of the great Whig
leader—better even as a likeness than that noble
idealised life-size representation of Lord John painted
a year or two ago by Mr. Grant, the Royal Acade-
mician. There is that wonderful limning of Daniel
O'Connell—as the Liberator appeared when age had
begun to dim the sparkle of his eye, and to relax and
multiply the lines upon his mobile and thoroughly

[Ebelill-an countenance. There is Carrick's- fa-
mous miniature of Lablache, with his gay,
riant, fat, handsome Italian face, crowned with
that "shock" of white hair that might have befitted
the scalp of Sir John Falstaff—a marvel of art, in
its way, this last portraiture, as it wall need be in
fact—a Miniature of a Giant of Song like Lablache,
an Iliad in a nutshell. Then there is the admirable
companion semblance of William Farren, the come-
dian—representing the inimitable old-man actor, as
he looked before his voice became groggy and his
memory treacherous. Besides all which, are there
not stores of others, equally well known in their
way, pencilled by the same skilful and delicate
brush, veritable reflexions of the features of notabi-
lities, some of them still happily living, several long
since dead—Thomas Carlyle and Lord Lyndhurst,
Samuel Rogers and William Wordsworth ? Long
after Mr. Carrick had acquired for himself, by these
and similar examples of his perfect mastery of
his art, a high and conspicuous reputa-
tion, there appeared a formidable competitor
to the whole of his craft, to artists in
oil and water-colours, to painters of full-length por-
traits, kitkats, and miniatures. In other words, the
dim, shadowy, uncertain, spectral Daguerreotype de-
veloped into that wondrous art of Photography, which
has been rendered all but instantaneous in its action
by the magical agency of the Collodion, and has even
at last taken to itself an apparent form and substance
by its marvellous application to the wizard mecha-
nism of the Stereoscope.
There is, however, an old threadbare scrap of
Latinity that tells us it is well to take a hint even
from an enemy—fas est ab haste doceri. So, happily
for himself and his sitters, has thought Mr. Carrick.
If so very obvious a joke is permissable, it is appa-
rent enough, from some of the older faces portrayed
by his new system, that our eminent miniature
painter has taken a wrinkle or two from photo-
graphy. It is one of the most remarkable ad-
vances yet made simultaneously in the develop-
ment of the photographic art and in the facilitation,
and yet more the elevation of the old art of miniature
painting. Mr. Carrick's plan is in itself sufficiently
simple : it is the acceptance of a photograph in one
of its earlier stages as the basis for an elaborately
painted miniature. It is, in other words, the
transformation by him of photographic portraits
into pictures of extraordinary brilliancy and
exquisite finish—pictures requiring for their produc-
tion a skill like his, a [delicacy. of touch like his,
and an eye like his for the scrupulous preservation
of that soul of a portrait—the individuality ! There
was but one thing really wanting for-the two arts,
and Eureka! it is here discoverable in their cOmbi.
nation.
nki The Gretna Green for this coebient mar-
riage of Miniature Painting and Photography
is, at the present moment,. fixed at Scar- ,;
borough, There, at the establishment of a skil- ;
ful photogrOher of the 'lotality,. ;Mr
Ti* Milers hair. Sarony,
tli
magic union is accomplished.
comes in aid of the sunbeam. The colourless ray
takes a permanent hue from the palette. And the
neutral tints of the photographic likeness glow under
the brush of Mr. Carrick with the richest colours of the
most delicately-pencilled miniature. Judging of
the results from what we ourselves have witnessed,
they are veritable triumphs in the way of life-like
portraiture.

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