The English miniature

The painting of portrait miniatures in watercolour is a peculiarly English art form, for no other country supported a continuous and flourishing school of artists working in this manner over a period of almost four hundred years. Technically the art derived from the studios of the Flemish-Burgundian manuscript illuminators, and from the beginning many of its most distinguished practictioners were from the Continent. The art was firmly established in England by the brilliant achievements of Holbein and Hilliard and became thereafter symbolic of the Elizabethan settlement and central to the culture of the English nation state in the renaissance.\\It was the art initially of a small elite, the builders of galleries and cabinets that comprehended and arranged the phenomena of man and nature, but as that class of collectors expanded in the seventeenth-century Baconian "revolution", so the art of the miniature, in significant association, became the property of the metropolitan intellectuals, spread between court and city. From the sixteenth century, miniature painters were particularly effective in the commerce of their art, and with the eighteenth-century developments in patronage and the exhibition system of marketing, miniatures became even more firmly a part of the day to day accoutrement of aristocratic life in London and in the provinces. Towards the end of the period, the art in terms of both technique and its customers had spread far beyond its original asscoiateion andwas equally a symbol of bourgeois prosperity, until displaced in the early years of the twentieth century by the portrait photograph.