R.E. Hill Countess of Wilton after Sir Thomas Lawrence

Portrait Miniatures: Early 19th-century Watercolours

This painting forms part of a group of exceptional watercolour portrait miniatures which derive from an album dating from the 1830s. The paintings are by a variety of hands, including Charles Frederick Bulkley (1812–1869), Benjamin Baldwin (fl.1826–1847) and Edward Purcell (fl.1812–1831). What the paintings share is that they are small in scale and exquisitely executed, with the fineness of brushwork—delicate touches and dots—associated with portrait miniatures.

Sitters include some notable figures of the day: Mary Margaret Stanley Egerton, Countess of Wilton (1801–1858), the actress Lucia Elizabeth Vestris (1797–1856) and the artist James Northcote RA (1746–1831). Others are idealised anonymous beauties—rustic, shawled and caped young ladies, and a man and woman of the Circassia people, reputed to be the most beautiful in the world.

These paintings are examples of the prevailing 19th-century fashion for larger and more richly detailed miniatures in the style developed by the Scottish miniaturist Andrew Robertson (1777–1845) at the beginning of the century. Robertson's work broke with previous 18th-century styles and particularly that of Richard Cosway (1742–1821), whose paintings he criticised as 'pretty things but not pictures'. Like Robertson's miniatures, many of the paintings in this collection are fuller portraits with suggested settings or props; emulating large oils on canvas, they are rectangular in format and with gum arabic added to the paint to give it greater lustre and depth of colour.

These exquisite examples of portraits from the early 19th century are very much of their time. The work of top-class miniaturists was extremely expensive, given the painstaking time and skill taken to produce their paintings, and the art began to die out as the 19th century progressed. The advent of photography from the mid-19th century provided a wider public with affordable, accurate likenesses. Many miniaturists at the cheaper end of the market took up photography, while younger artists rarely pursued careers as miniaturists.