Physical description
Portrait miniature of a young girl, half-length, holding a carnation; inscriptions in gold on either side of the head; set into a circular frame; a heart or diamond printed on the reverse of the support card.
Place of Origin
England, Great Britain (painted)
Date
1590 (made)
Artist/maker
Oliver, Isaac, born 1558 - died 1617 (painter (artist))
Materials and Techniques
Watercolour on vellum stuck to a playing card and set in an ivory frame
Marks and inscriptions
'Ano Dni. 1590. / AEtatis Suae. 4.'
Dimensions
Depth: 9 mm, Diameter: 64 mm
Descriptive line
Portrait miniatuer of a young girl, aged five, watercolour on vellum, by Isaac Oliver, 1590.
Bibliographic References (Citation, Note/Abstract, NAL no)
Baker, Malcolm and Richardson, Brenda, eds. A Grand Design : The Art of the Victoria and Albert Museum. London: V&A Publications, 1997. 431 p., ill. ISBN 1851773088.
Full text of the entry:
"Girl Aged Four, Holding an Apple V&A P.145-1910.
Girl Aged Five, Holding a Carnation. V&A P.146-1910
These two charming portraits of young sisters were among eighty miniatures acquired with the George Salting bequest in 1910. This bequest effectively established the V&A as the collection of miniatures. The National Gallery received Salting's ""pictures"" and the British Museum his ""drawings"" but public opinion was divided about whether miniatures should be categorised as pictures or drawings. The V&A's own 1908 committee on Re-arrangement argued that miniatures had ""no relation to applied art"" and thus no place at the V&A. (Significantly and perhaps defiantly, it was in 1908 that the V&A published the first catalogue of miniatures.)
In fact, the V&A had long played an active role in promoting the importance of miniature painting in the history of English art. An 1859 Museum catalogue devoted to ""pictures"" (but ironically, including no miniatures) stated that ""from the earliest time there was one branch of art in which English artists had a reputation even on the continent.... [And] excelled other nations, namely miniature painting in watercolours."" By the 1850s the invention of photography had all but destroyed the contemporary miniature, but the history of miniature painting began to be nostalgically reappraised, led by the V&A. Without precedent, ""antiquarian"" miniatures figured prominently in an 1862 loan exhibition at the Museum. Their popularity led in 1865 to an extraordinary loan exhibition of nearly four-thousand miniatures (including Queen Elizabeth I, cat.122).
The acquisition of the Salting bequest was seen as the moment to settle Museum policy regarding miniatures. Salting's collection unofficially established the V&A as the primary institution for the collecting of miniatures and for research on this subject. The Museum also houses the National Collection of Watercolours, which has subtly influenced the collecting and interpretation of miniatures. Within the V&A miniatures took their place as early forms of watercolour painting, as an integral part of what was seen as an essentially English tradition.
A specific outcome of this research was the rejection of the earlier attribution of this pair of miniatures to Levina Teerlinc, and the pair's acceptance as two of the earliest surviving works of Isaac Oliver, one of the foremost English miniature painters. Later discussion has drawn attention to the symbolic if enigmatic, significance of the apple and carnation, the figures' frowning and smiling expressions, and the possible dynastic meanings of these portraits of children, so rare before the eighteenth century.
Lit.Williamson, 1904, addendum, p.xx; V&A , 1926, p.46; Strong,1983, p.102; V&A, 1985a, pp.44-5
KATHERINE COOMBS"
100 Great Paintings in The Victoria & Albert Museum. London: V&A, 1985. 220 p., ill. ISBN 094810769X.
The following is the full text of the entry:
"Isaac Oliver d.1617
British School
MINIATURE PORTRAITS OF TWO LITTLE GIRLS
Body colour on card, 5.1 X 3.2 cm
P.145, 146-1910. Salting Bequest.
Portraits of infants before the 18th century are very rare, and these two little girls must therefore have been of some great dynastic importance in the English body politic of 1590. At this date miniature painting was still an art restricted to a very narrow circle around the person of the sovereign, a highly educated élite of state officers and courtiers, including their professional advisers and suppliers of cultural services.
The portraiture of both Hilliard and Oliver was, as far as we can see, exclusively concerned with this group, and within it, it is usually possible to distinguish by their dress and by the make-up of the portrait the grandees from the professionals. These children were emphatically grandees.
The rarity of strongly individualized child portraits is largely accounted for by the high rates of infant mortality which seems to have inhibited the sort of emotional bonds between parents and their off-spring that seem natural to us. The portrait is a badge of inclusion in a society, proclaiming membership of a household and a place in the wider world. Until children could be relied upon to survive, investment of emotional and material resources in their future seems to have been kept to an economic minimum. The changeover to the modern approach was long drawn out over the 17th and 18th centuries, culminating in the cult of impassioned grief at the death of children recognizable in much 19th-century fiction.
This progresses more or less step by step with the Enlightenment, with advances in practical science and with a broad cultural attentiveness to the mores of marriage and family life. The process, as a phenomenon with real political impetus, begins with the emergence in government of the Protestant rationalist élite under Elizabeth I. The two little girls were presumably scions of this élite, and Oliver, whose work is often distinguishable by the vigorous naturalism of the facial modelling, has endowed each of them with a convincing and characterful presence. The pink and the apple, symbols in Christian iconography of the Virgin and the Fall, are puzzling in this context. They perhaps make some more temporary or anecdotal allusion, reinforcing the personal quality of the images.
The attribution of the miniatures has an amusing history. Male art historians and connoisseurs, possibly influenced by the idea that children were women's business, started the notion that the portraits were by Levina Teerlinc, then a shadowy figure known only from the records of payments to her in the royal accounts. In the 1930s Simone Bergmans, a Belgian scholar, studied the two miniatures and another of similar date which she 'proved' was a self- portrait of Teerlinc. After the war, Carl Winter applied the techniques of style-analysis to the miniatures and argued cogently that they were by Isaac Oliver, and Erna Auerbach seemed to have settled the matter by her discovery that Levina Teerlinc had died in 1576. In ignorance of all this, however, Eleanor Tufts in a book called Our Hidden Heritage (New York, 1974) used the miniature to exemplify the theory that male dominated art history had systematically expropriated the achievements of female artists and attributed their greatest works to men. Since then the question has come up every time a new academic course or public exhibition on Women Artists has been planned.
John Murdoch"
Strong, Roy. Artists of the Tudor Court: the Portrait Miniature Rediscovered 1520-1620.. London: The Victoria and Albert Museum, 1983.
Cat. 146, p. 102. Full Citation:
“ISAAC OLIVER
145 Girl aged four, 1590
Victoria & Albert Museum (P.145-1910)
Vellum stuck to a playing card with half a red cipher (hear or diamond) showing at the reverse, oval, 54 x 43 mm, 2 1/8 x 1 11/16 in.”
Cat. 146, p. 102. Full Citation:
“ISAAC OLIVER
146 Girl aged five, 1590
Victoria & Albert Museum (P.146-1910)
Vellum stuck to a playing card with part of the picture (possibly a King) showing at the reverse, oval, 54 x 43 mm, 2 1/8 x 1 11/16 in.
Originally oddly attributed to Levina Teerlinc, the correct attribution being made by Carl Winter in 1943. These are amongst Oliver’s earliest surviving miniatures and already establish him as an artist whose range and approach was to be much more varied and complex than Hilliard, Miniatures of children, other than royal ones, are of the utmost rarity and the two girls must have been of exceptional status. Williamson, not an infallible source, states that when there were in the possession of C. H. T. Hawkins they had with them a slip of paper stating that they were painted at Greenwich in 1590 (Williamson, Catalogue, 1906, I, p. 20). Salting, who bequeathed them to the V&A had never seen this piece of paper, if, indeed, it ever existed.
Justifiably, these miniatures quickly established themselves as two of Oliver’s most popular works.
INSCRIBED: (P.145-1910): On either side of the head: Ano Dni. 1590 / AEtatis Suae. 5. (P.146-1910): On either side of the head: Ano Dni. 1590. / AEtatis Suae. 4.
COLLECTIONS: C. H. T. Hawkins sale, Christie’s 13th to 17th May 1904 (908); bt. E. M. Hodgkins; bequeathed to the V&A with the Salting collection, 1910.
LITERATURE: Williamson, Catalogue, 1906, I, p.20.
J. J. Foster, The Athenaeum, May 13th 1911.
Simone Bergmans, “The Miniatures of Levina Teerlinc”, Burlington Magazine, LXIV, 1934, pp. 232-36.
Winter, Elizabethan Miniatures, pp. 26-27, pl. IX.
V&A, 1947 (141, 142).
Auerbach, Hilliard, pp. 236-38, 328 (no. 235).
Exhibition History
A Grand Design - The Art of the Victoria and Albert Museum (Victoria and Albert Museum 14/10/1999-16/01/2000)
Labels and date
British Galleries:
These two little girls are shown wearing fine clothes and their lace ruffs are particularly grown-up in style. The frowning child carries an apple which was a symbol of the Fall of Eve. The smiling child is holding a pink carnation, a symbol of love, faithfulness and religious salvation. [27/03/2003]
Materials
Watercolour; Cardboard; Vellum
Techniques
Painting
Subjects depicted
Flowers; Children; Girls; Ruff; Childhood; Ruffs; Cauls (headgear)
Categories
Portraits; Children & Childhood; Paintings
Collection code
PDP
