Miniature Painting on Ivory
Miniature painting on ivory was the leading technique of personal portrait jewellery in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries - the finest watercolour work on ivory plaques 1 to 5 cm across, set in gold mounts and worn as a pendant, brooch or bracelet.
Written by Dr. Helene Vasall
Miniature painting on ivory was the most important medium of personal portrait jewellery before photography. For more than a century - roughly 1720 to 1840 - it was the only way to make a recognisable portrait of a particular person wearable. Its decline is therefore also the transition from an aristocratic craft practice of remembrance to a technical, middle-class one.
Technique
An ivory miniature is produced in several clearly separated stages:
- Preparing the support. A thin slice is sawn from an ivory tusk (elephant or walrus), ground flat and brought to a thickness of 0.3 to 0.8 mm. The front is roughened slightly with pumice so that the watercolour has a key.
- Underpainting. The basic composition is laid in with diluted watercolour in thin glazes - hair, clothing, background.
- Flesh tones. The areas of skin are modelled in many fine brushstrokes, often in a stippling technique. This is where the real artistic challenge lies - fine transitions between shadow and light with a minimum of pigment.
- Detail work. Eyes, mouth, jewellery and the highlights on fabric are worked up with the finest brushes (one to three hairs).
- Mounting. The finished miniature is set behind a rock-crystal or glass cabochon in a gold mount. The reverse frequently contains a hollow setting for a lock of hair or a small inscription plate.
The working time for a good miniature was between two and five weeks; very fine work could take months.
Types of image
The most important forms of miniature in a jewellery context:
Full portrait. A half-length or bust image of the sitter, frontal or in three-quarter profile. The classic format for a pendant or a large brooch.
Eye miniature (lover's eye). A special form showing only one eye; it has an entry of its own (see Lovers' Eye).
Sentimental motif. A symbolic image instead of a person - weeping willow over an urn, a hand holding forget-me-nots, an anchor. Frequently in the sepia variant (see Sepia Hair Painting).
Double portrait. Two people - usually a married couple, or a mother with a child - on one miniature. Rare and correspondingly valuable.
On mourning miniatures the portrait of the deceased almost always sits in a black-enamelled gold mount, often with an inscription (initials, date of death) on the reverse. A hollow setting for hair is the rule.
Workshops and market conditions
Miniature painting was a profession in its own right, and one held in high social regard. In England the stars of the trade worked at court and in the West End - Richard Cosway, Andrew Plimer, George Engleheart, later Andrew Robertson. In France Jean-Baptiste Isabey and Pierre-Paul Prud'hon dominated; in the German residence cities, Heinrich Friedrich Füger (Vienna) and Christian Friedrich Reinhold Lisiewski (Berlin).
Depending on the master, a miniature cost between a week's and a month's wages for a mid-ranking official. Unlike the mass-produced daguerreotype that followed, miniatures were unique pieces, often with documented provenance. Famous artists signed their work (frequently hidden within the image); unsigned pieces are attributed through stylistic analysis.
Relation to jewellery practice
The miniature is not itself the piece of jewellery - it is made into one by its mount. The goldsmith supplied a pendant, a brooch or a bangle with a field for the image; the miniaturist filled that field. The two trades worked together but remained strictly separate - miniaturists signed their picture, goldsmiths their mount. A complete provenance records both.
Decline through photography
The decline began with the invention of the daguerreotype in 1839. The chief advantages of photography:
- Price. A daguerreotype cost a fraction of a miniature.
- Speed. A few sittings sufficed; over the course of the 1850s, only one.
- Fidelity. The daguerreotype showed the person as they really looked - the miniature showed them as the painter saw them.
By 1870 miniature painting was largely dead as a commercial craft. The last workshops survived as niches serving aristocratic clients who found the photograph too “bourgeois”. By the 1920s the tradition had broken off for good.
Conservation and the collectors' market
Ivory miniatures are collectors' objects today. The most important rules of conservation:
- UV protection - direct sunlight, and strong artificial light too, will fade watercolour pigments
- Stable climate - ivory warps with fluctuations in humidity; cracks are barely reversible
- Preserve the original mount - remounting reduces the historical value considerably
- CITES documentation - commercial trade in some pieces requires proof of pre-Convention acquisition
Well-preserved, signed pieces by the leading names (Cosway, Isabey, Engleheart) fetch five-figure prices at auction today; straightforward pieces from reputable schools four to five figures; anonymous pieces considerably less, depending on condition and composition.
Miniature painting today
A small contemporary scene exists - above all in Britain (Royal Society of Miniature Painters) and in the United States (American Society of Miniaturists). Its artists work on synthetic supports (polymer plates) or on very thin porcelain, because new ivory cannot be traded internationally. Stylistically most of them look to the Georgian tradition; technically, today's pieces are comparable with the historical ones.
In modern memorial jewellery the miniature hardly plays a part any more. Anyone wanting a portrait element today turns to a laser engraving of a photograph on a gold plate - technically simpler, optically more consistent, but without the distinctive painterly character of the Georgian miniature.
Questions about this entry
- Why ivory as a support?
Thinly cut ivory (0.3 to 0.8 mm) has an evenly warm, slightly translucent ground tone that lends watercolour painting a particular depth and a lively flesh tint. It also takes pigment well while remaining smooth enough for the finest brushstrokes. From the early eighteenth century onwards, vellum and copper supports were almost entirely displaced by ivory.
- How large is a typical miniature?
Between 3 and 6 cm in height; the lover's eye, as a special case, is smaller still (1.5 to 3 cm). Larger pieces (up to 10 cm) are rare and belonged to the wall or desk variant rather than to wearable jewellery.
- Are ivory miniatures legal today?
Historical ivory miniatures (pre-1947) may be traded within the EU with appropriate documentation (a CITES certificate for pre-Convention acquisition). New pieces made from ivory are largely prohibited internationally; contemporary miniaturists work on synthetic supports or on very thin porcelain plaques.
- How should an inherited miniature be conserved?
UV protection is decisive - direct daylight will fade the pigments within decades. Fluctuations in climate warp the ivory and can lead to cracks. Storage in a dark cabinet at stable humidity (50–55 %) is standard. Restoration belongs exclusively in specialist hands.
Further reading
- The English Portrait Miniature: A Historical Survey - Daphne Foskett (1979)
- Portrait Miniatures from the Time of Holbein to Augustus John - Graham Reynolds (1998)
- Victoria and Albert Museum - Portrait Miniatures
- Bayerisches Nationalmuseum - Miniaturensammlung
Related entries
- Core conceptsSentimental Jewellery
Sentimental jewellery is the jewellery of the age of sensibility between 1760 and 1840 - pieces in which love, friendship and grief share the same imagery, and in which hair, miniature painting and personal inscriptions first become the load-bearing form.
- Core conceptsMemorial Jewellery
Memorial jewellery is jewellery that deliberately binds itself to one particular person - through an inscription, a photograph, hair, ashes or, the defining medium today, a digitally captured fingerprint.
- Core conceptsMourning Jewellery
Mourning jewellery is body adornment that signals a death, binds the memory of a deceased person, or does both at once - since the 17th century a jewellery type in its own right, with a material language of its own.
- Techniques & craftLovers' Eye
A lover's eye is a painted miniature of an eye on ivory, set into a brooch or pendant - an English special form of sentimental jewellery in which the identifying face is absent and only the eye remains.
- Techniques & craftSepia Hair Painting
Sepia hair painting combines two sentimental techniques: chopped human hair is worked with sepia ink into a pigment mixture and used as the medium for tiny mourning miniatures set beneath rock crystal.
- Techniques & craftHairwork
Hairwork is the collective term for all techniques in which human hair becomes the carrier material of a piece of jewellery - from a single lock beneath rock crystal to finely plaited hair weaving in the Victorian showpiece manner.
- Jewellery formsMourning Locket
The mourning locket is a pendant worn on a neck chain with an interior compartment - a concealed carrier of hair, photograph or inscription that keeps the memento close to the body and has been, from the eighteenth century to the present, the most important private form of mourning jewellery.
- Jewellery formsMourning Brooch
The mourning brooch is the central women's jewellery form of Victorian mourning wear - a brooch, often the size of a palm, pinned to dress, collar or veil, and today an almost exclusively historical field of collecting.
- PeriodsThe Georgian Era (1714–1837)
The Georgian era spans the reigns of the four kings George I to George IV and of William IV in Britain. In mourning jewellery it is the epoch in which sentimental jewellery was invented - sepia hair painting, the lover's eye, the miniature portrait on ivory, and the posy ring in transition to the memento mori ring.
- PeriodsBiedermeier (1815–1848)
Biedermeier is the German-speaking mourning-jewellery epoch between the Congress of Vienna and the revolution of 1848 - a bourgeois, introverted period of forget-me-nots, Berlin iron and hairwork mosaic, with an understanding of mourning jewellery oriented more towards the family and the private sphere than towards the court.