International studio (33.1907/1908(1908))

Exhibition of Miniatures

which his name
stands to those of
these two great
leaders of Ameri-
can landscape art.
Mr. Evans’s gift,
we may remind
our readers, in-
cludes Housatonic
Valley; Flume,
Opalescent River;
Autumn at Ark-
v ill e; Spring
Landscape, by
Wyant, and Near
Newport and Old
Mill at St. Cloud, by Homer D. Marlin, N. A.
SIXTH ANNUAL EXHIBITION OF
MINIATURES AT THE PENNSYL-
VANIA ACADEMY OF THE FINE
ARTS
BY J. NILSEN LAURVIK
Despite the powerful rivalry of photography,
miniature painting has survived, and within the
past few years there has been a pronounced re-
vival of interest in this delicate art. It is not many
years since this renewed interest blossomed forth,
mushroomlike, into a veritable craze, which was
quickly exploited commercially by all sorts of in-
competents, charlatans and cheap department
stores, who threw in a miniature or two with every
cash purchase. These, of course, were nothing
more than the cheapest and most tawdry kind of
colored photographs, made to simulate a miniature,
and accepted by many undiscriminating persons
as a fair substitute. And the golden age of the fake
miniature came, stayed, and passed, like a bad
dream. Its ivorst and most permanent results,
however, wrere not the flooding of untold house-
holds with these abominations, which were too
crude to do any real harm, but in opening an op-
portunity to many wholly incompetent pretenders,
who saw in this newly aroused taste a profitable
field for the exploitation of their otherwise un-
saleable efforts. These have been the worst enemies
of the art of miniature painting, and their inept,
poorly drawn and badly colored ivories have done
much to instil in the minds of many the notion
that a miniature cannot be a serious work of art.
To combat and effectually demonstrate the utter
fallacy of this idea has been the aim and purpose

of the American Society of Miniature Painters,
organized in 1900, of which the Pennsylvania
Society of Miniature Painters is an offshoot. The
exhibition, held in Philadelphia under the auspices
of the local Society of Miniature Painters and the
Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts, from October
28 to November 17, was one of the most notable
ever held in this country. It furnished indubitable
evidence that miniature painting in the hands of
its most eminent exponents to-day is possessed of a
vitality, a beauty and grace rivaling the best work
done in the past.
In spite of the high artistic excellence of the best
work of our modern miniaturists, not a few still
regard it as a sort of curiosity, at best a remarkable
feat of technical skill in executing with such
minuteness in so small a compass the features of a
head. In view of this misconception, it may not
be amiss to recall that painters no less celebrated
than Hans Holbein have devoted a considerable
portion of their time to the painting of miniatures.
Much of the work of Giotto and his fellows of the
Renaissance has essentially the character of a
miniature, not only as exhibited in the delicately
illumined missals and manuscripts, but more
particularly as shown in the medallion pictures
with which so many embellished the “Predella”
of their altar pieces. Vassari describes a number
of these paintings “in little,” as they came to be
called, comprising many small figures so carefully
done that they have all the appearance of a
miniature. Nor has this art failed to win recogni-
tion among the greatest portrait painters in oils.


PORTRAIT BY ELEANOR T. WRAGG


MRS. SYDNEY TAYLOR
BY EMILY DRAYTON TYLER

c