 
Pictured are both sides of the portrait miniature "Harriet Mackie (The Dead Bride)" (1804). Hair of the individual pictured was often included in a decorative arrangement on the reverse side of the jewelry encasing the image.
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of portrait miniatures
A young bride on her deathbed, President George Washington, Martha Washington in widowhood, a seductress, ships' captains, their lonely wives and children separated from their parents by distance or death -- these are some of the faces that will be on view in "Love and Loss: American Portrait and Mourning Miniatures" at the Yale University Art Gallery.
The show, on view Oct. 3-Dec. 30, includes about 140 American portrait miniatures -- most of them small enough to fit in the palm of the hand -- as well as larger paintings showing how the images were worn as jewelry.
The art of portrait miniatures flourished from the mid-18th to the mid-19th centuries. These images were commissioned to commemorate births, engagements, marriages, deaths and other unions or separations. They were usually painted in watercolor on thin disks of ivory and housed under glass in lockets, brooches or bracelets. They often included a decoratively arranged lock of the sitter's hair (and sometimes that of the person who commissioned the portrait) on the reverse side. In fact, hair was often chopped up or dissolved to paint mourning miniatures.
"The miniature's rise in popularity in the North American colonies in the mid-18th century coincided with a greater cultural emphasis on romantic love, marriage, and affection between parents and children," explains Robin Jaffee Frank, associate curator of American paintings and sculpture at the gallery, who organized the exhibition and wrote the related book.
"Depictions of people wearing miniatures," she continues, "eloquently testify to the personal and social significance of these tiny mementos."
In fact, she notes, portrait miniatures became so much a part of upper- and middle-class American life that they were a specialty of such artists as James Peale, John Ramage and Edward Greene Malbone. The show also includes miniatures by major easel painters, including the only one made by Benjamin West.
The works in the exhibition are selected from Yale's collection of American portrait miniatures, along with a promised bequest and loans from private collections.
Frank and her team searched for the identity and background of both the sitters and portrait painters featured in the show. Both the labels in the show and the accompany the 362-page book, published by Yale University Press, feature anecdotes about these individuals, as well as historical information about private life and society in 18th- and 19th-century America.
As they enter the exhibit, visitors can examine a display of the miniaturist's tools -- a work desk, brushes, paint box, a reducing glass, and component parts and cases -- and learn how these artists constructed the tiny objects. A video projection will show magnified and rotating images of miniatures, so viewers can see them from all sides.
The show is divided into several sections:
"The First American Miniaturists: Experiments in a Secret Art," includes Benjamin West's sole effort, as well as a video presentation, and works by Charles Willson Peale and John Singleton Copley.
"Miniatures and the Young Republic" includes a look at "The Cult of Washington." According to Frank, the national grief at Washington's death inspired an unprecedented display of portrait and allegorical miniatures. Likenesses of the Founding Father, both as a public figure and private man, were displayed in everything from pendants to a snuff box. This, she notes, led to a wider market for mourning miniatures.
"The Flourishing of the American Miniature" focuses on the romantic tokens that served as surrogates for an absent loved one or a secret love. The display includes numerous miniatures by members of the Peale dynasty -- James, Raphaelle, Anna Claypoole, and Charles Willson -- and double portraits of married couples. Highlights include William Doyle's "Young Lady in a Sheer White Dress" and "Beauty Revealed (SelfPortrait)," miniaturist Sarah Goodridge's limning of her own breasts, a secret gift to statesman Daniel Webster.
The exhibit also explores how the invention of photography in the 1830s affected the market for miniatures. It closes with a group of mourning miniatures in a section titled "Not Lost but Gone Before."
"More than any other token of the time," says Frank, "the mourning miniature expressed the universal longing to keep the dead within the circle of the living."
The exhibition and accompanying book were made possible in part by The Henry Luce Foundation, Inc. and a grant from the National Endowment for the Arts, a federal agency. Additional support came from the Virginia and Leonard Marx Publication Fund and the Mrs. Lelia Wardwell Bequest. Conservation was supported by the Getty Grant Program. The Yale Art Gallery is indebted to Davida Tenenbaum Deutsch and Alvin Deutsch Esq., Yale LL.B. 1958, for the promised bequest of their collection of American miniatures. Crucial loans also came from Gloria Manney, Leonard Hill, the Gibbes Museum of Art, Charleston, the Detroit Institute of Arts, the Maryland Historical Society, the Mead Art Museum at Amherst College, and the New York Historical Association, Cooperstown. Artists' tools were lent by the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, the New- York Historical Society, the Stamford Historical Society and the Winterthur Museum.
After its showing at Yale, the exhibition will travel to the Gibbes Museum of Art in Charleston, South Carolina and the Addison Gallery at Phillips Academy, Andover, Massachusetts.
The gallery is presenting several programs in conjunction with "Love and Loss: American Portrait and Mourning Miniatures." These include an opening lecture by Frank on Friday, Oct. 6, at 5:30 p.m. This will be followed by a museum-wide celebration of all the special exhibitions, with music in the galleries and a reception in the sculpture hall.
There will also be a symposium titled "Facing the Past and Present: the Portrait in American Art," on Wednesday, Oct. 18, at 12:20 p.m. Watch for news about this and other upcoming events in future issues of the Yale Bulletin & Calendar.
The Yale Art Gallery, at 1111 Chapel St., is open to the public free of charge 10 a.m.-5 p.m. Tuesday-Saturday and 1-6 p.m. Sunday. It is closed Mondays and major holidays. A wheelchair-accessible entrance is at 201 York St. For taped general and program information, call (203) 432-0600, or visit the gallery's website at www.yale.edu/artgallery.
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