Big Things Come in Small Packages

It is hard to attract attention at four inches high when your competition stands at six feet. Such is the situation with miniature painting in the United States, which I suspect few of us consider when we think about developments in painting during the first half of the twentieth century, focused as we likely are on works on canvas in oils (or synthetic paint—think of Jackson Pollock). Yet this diminutive medium, usually executed in watercolor on ivory, was justly celebrated around the turn of the twentieth century, and remained popular through the 1950s.¹ Demand for painted miniature portraits had existed from the sixteenth century through the first half of the nineteenth century in Europe, and from the eighteenth century in North America, but dried up with the availability of less expensive and more quickly produced photographic portraits. Though a small number of miniaturists continued to paint in the latter half of the nineteenth century, it was not until the 1890s that a group of American artists initiated a renaissance of the medium. These painters revitalized the medium by expanding its range of subjects and introducing techniques reflective of modern developments in painting, while maintaining a commitment to masterful craftsmanship and traditional materials. The Art Students League was situated at the center of this revival, serving as the base for a community of the leading artists who studied and taught there. This group of League-affiliated artists established the contours of the miniature medium that enjoyed continuous appreciation during the first half of the twentieth century, but which currently is generally neglected.

Why has this art been so overlooked? One reason has been a conscious, or perhaps unconscious, bias against small-scale works. Elsie Dodge Pattee (1876-1975), a miniaturist herself, commented on this blind spot among critics in 1925: “The small size and presumably intimate intent of the miniature exercise an almost paralyzing effect on some critics, who seem unable to perceive form, design and color on a surface measuring less than 9 inches.”² To an audience accustomed to looking at paintings from a distance hung in a gallery, the intimate experience of viewing a miniature may also feel disconcertingly foreign: “For one of [the miniature’s] chief attractions is that it may be seen all at once, like a jewel, may be held in the hand and enjoyed in any light and at any angle, pondered over, delighted in, studied and caressed.”³ A parallel may be drawn to the medium of the medal, a hand-held bas-relief sculpture popular at the same time and now frequently ignored, for which many League instructors designed: for example, Daniel Chester French, Augustus Saint-Gaudens, Hermon Atkins MacNeil, James Earle Fraser, Robert Aitken, and Leo Mielziner. Another cause of marginalization that relates to scale has been the biased perception that the medium is feminine. The semi-transparency of watercolor, palettes tending toward relatively bright hues, and finely controlled brushwork often combine to produce a refined beauty, which has been associated with a female sensibility: “It is possible the delicacy required calls, as a rule, for the touch of a woman’s hand, or perhaps the daintiness is more in keeping with the gentler sex.”⁴ The vast majority of exhibiting miniaturists were women—upwards of 90%, according to a study by the Philadelphia Museum of Art⁵—but in fact four leaders of the miniature revival were men, which undercuts the notion of an inherently feminine medium.⁶ Illustrated here is Nymph (1898) by one of these painters, William J. Baer (1860-1941) (fig. 1).⁷ Finally, there has been a tendency to privilege modernist movements incorporating varying degrees of abstraction in the first half of the century. Miniaturists remained representational, only drawing inspiration from late nineteenth-century innovations in the painting of the Impressionists and James A.M. Whistler that they considered compatible.

The miniature revival was started in the 1890s by a small number of painters who in many instances were not initially specialists in the medium, but who independently experimented with it alongside their larger oil paintings. These painters assembled into societies for the promotion of miniature painting, through the mounting of annual exhibitions and through the encouragement of the highest standards. The two earliest, longest lasting, and most influential societies were the American Society of Miniature Painters (ASMP), formed in New York City in 1899, and the Pennsylvania Society of Miniature Painters (PSMP), founded in Philadelphia in 1901. Seven of the ten founding members of the ASMP had ties to the Art Students League as former students, or would soon teach there: Isaac A. Josephi (1860-1954), Lydia Field Emmet (1866-1952), Laura Coombs Hills (1859-1952), William J. Whittemore (1860-1955), Alice Beckington (1868-1942), Lucia Fairchild Fuller (1870-1924), and Theodora W. Thayer (1868-1905).⁸

One of the most influential artists among this group, and the one with the most extensive ties to the Art Students League, was Lucia Fairchild Fuller. American miniature painting of the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries typically involved a bust portrait set in an oval frame, and though Fuller received acclaim for her works that followed this tradition, she gained particular attention for her pieces in a rectangular format that adapted subjects and compositional approaches from oil paintings. The solid training she received in classes at the League prepared her to think big while working small. She took classes with William Merritt Chase and H. Siddons Mowbray in the early 1890s, and three of the four drawings by her in the League’s collection bear labels from the latter’s morning life class (fig. 2).⁹ These drawings demonstrate her working knowledge of anatomy, her feel for proportion and the arrangement of the body’s masses, and her ability to use light and shadow to construct convincing forms. This training, which built upon a foundation she received from Dennis Miller Bunker in her home town of Boston, certainly gave her the ability to execute paintings on the largest scale, such as the Women of Plymouth mural for the Women’s Building at the World’s Columbian Exposition in Chicago in 1893.¹⁰ She also capitalized on it to attain success in full-length figure miniatures, an early example of which is Girl with Hand-Glass (fig. 3), a Whistlerian composition she exhibited at the Twenty-First Annual Exhibition of the Society of American Artists in New York City in the spring of 1899. It was one of seven paintings illustrated to accompany the exhibition’s review in Harper’s Weekly, and it was considered a sufficiently striking work to be parodied by League student Waldemar Dietrich, whose painting for the Society of American Fakirs’ exhibition that year won first prize.¹¹ More importantly, it was one of the miniatures she exhibited at the Exposition Universelle in Paris in 1900 that earned her a bronze medal, a silver medal at the Pan-American Exposition in Buffalo in 1901, and a gold medal at the Universal Exposition in Saint Louis in 1904.¹²

The lessons Fuller took away from Mowbray’s life class served her well in a series of miniatures of female nudes. Other contemporary miniaturists, like Baer (fig. 1), also broke new ground by painting nudes, but this was a genre in which Fuller particularly excelled, and which earned her high praise. In another of the medal-winning works she exhibited in New York, Paris, Buffalo, and Saint Louis, Girl Drying Her Foot, Fuller displayed her command of the female form, as well as her appreciation of Whistler in the cool tonal palette and the incorporation of the Japanese screen in the background (fig. 4).¹³ It was one of the works selected for illustration in the publication Chefs d’Oeuvre of the Exposition Universelle of 1900.¹⁴ A reviewer of the Society of American Artists exhibition commented favorably, “The two most interesting ivories of Miss Fuller are ‘The Girl with a Hand Glass’…and the ‘Girl Drying Her Foot.’ This last is exquisite…The figure is well drawn, the flesh delicate, the color clear.”¹⁵ Another reviewer similarly approved when the painting was exhibited in Buffalo: “The ‘Girl Drying Her Foot’…is the culminating point of the three [miniatures by Fuller], and…shows the peculiar loveliness possible to flesh painting in this branch of art.”¹⁶ Fuller showed the “exquisite Artemidora, a marvellously [sic] graceful nude figure”¹⁷ (fig. 5) at the ASMP and PSMP annual exhibitions in 1911, at the ASMP exhibition in 1912, at the Panama-Pacific International Exposition in San Francisco in 1915, and at the ASMP exhibition again in 1916 together with Girl Drying Her Foot. Both of these miniatures stood out to one reviewer: “The miniatures by Lucia Fairchild Fuller are likewise highly pleasing…Her ‘Girl Drying Her Foot’ and ‘Artemidora’ are particularly happy as interpretations of the undraped female figure. The body lines and the pleasing attitudes assumed by the models have all been most carefully worked out.”¹⁸

Fuller’s nude figure compositions belonged to an uncommon genre that crept into miniatures during the revival—as did still lifes, genre scenes, and landscapes—and elicited both censure and praise from critics. For example, the basis for one critic’s assessments was this succinct and tightly circumscribed definition of the medium: “A miniature, technically speaking, is a small bust portrait.”¹⁹ A reviewer of the 1916 ASMP exhibition wrote more pointedly about what was appropriate for miniatures when critiquing an idealized nude by William J. Baer, as well as Fuller’s painting: “The subject [of Baer’s Primavera] could have been much better handled on canvas, there is no possible excuse for doing it in miniature and every attempt has been made to forget the special qualities that miniatures on ivory can have. The criticism holds equally against Lucia Fairchild Fuller’s ‘Girl Drying Her Foot,’ which is skillfully enough drawn and colored, but stupid in the extreme, as a miniature.”²⁰ Already in 1902 a critic reviewing the third exhibition of the ASMP wrote in a similarly traditional vein: “Others one will hasten by because…they suggest only a large picture reduced to a small scale and have not the essential qualities that one is looking for in a miniature,” of which one was “daintiness.”²¹ Some reviewers were ambivalent: “Mrs. Lucia F. Fuller sends three pictures, one of which is a figure study called ‘Artemidora,’ that may not properly belong to this field of work but is an exquisitely painted ivory nevertheless, charming enough to make a stickler forgive its presence.”²² Proponents of a wider range of subjects and styles in miniatures also had their say, however: “Next year an effort should be made to secure more miniatures which are not portraits and weed the exhibition of goggle-eyed children and ladies smiling in and out of vacancy.”²³ In their view, the fundamentals that applied to large-scale paintings should also create the foundation for miniatures: “there is a clear tendency on the part of the stronger workers in the field of miniature to appreciate the fact that bigness and force are not matters of scale, that the most miniature surface embroidery is not incompatible with anatomical accuracy and artistically significant construction.”²⁴

Anatomical accuracy underpinned the success of Fuller’s figure paintings, as seen further in Près d’une Claire Fontaine (By a Clear Fountain) (fig. 6), shown at the exhibitions of the ASMP in 1908 and the PSMP in 1910,²⁵ and The Girl and the Net (fig. 7), shown at the PSMP in 1912, at the ASMP in 1913, and at the Panama-Pacific International Exposition.²⁶ The latter work, which depicts a moth-woman caught in a net, was Fuller’s attempt at a symbolic figure, and almost seems to respond to the reviewer’s comments upon nudes in the 1904 ASMP exhibition: “One could wish that the beginning thus made [in painting nudes] should be continued, and that our miniaturists would take up the mantle let fall by the old Academic painters and give us classic designs in this delicate method, so remote from realism and so charming as the vehicle of myth and fairy lore.”²⁷ Fuller’s livelihood depended on portrait commissions, but the pieces in other genres, which she called her “pleasure pictures,” most satisfied her ambitions.²⁸ She attended Kenyon Cox’s anatomy lectures at the League during the 1898-1899 season, and she acknowledged their importance to these works: “she describes Kenyon Cox’s anatomy lectures at that time as having been a great help and delight to her, so they probably played their part in enabling her to produce the well drawn nudes which she has sometimes exhibited.”²⁹ The miniaturist Elsie Dodge Pattee reaffirmed the importance of solid figure drawing: “‘The first requirement of a miniature painter,’ she says, ‘is an absolute and unfailing knowledge of the human figure. There are no tricks in miniature painting to cover up bad drawing.’”³⁰

In her review of the 1911 ASMP exhibition, Alice T. Searle gave her perspective on the key initiators of the miniature revival and their positive impact: “Some years ago Laura Hills, Lucia F. Fuller, Alice Beckington and a few others, all accomplished painters in the large, took up the work and began to show what fresh vision, originality and sincerity of purpose could do. They, with an ever-widening circle of followers, may today be called the ‘miniature secessionists,’ as they are not only reviving something of the rank and distinction of the courtly old art but are developing a vigorous new school, thus securing again for miniature painting a worthy place in American art.”³¹ The “few others” who belonged to the “miniature secessionists” included Lydia Field Emmet, Mabel R. Welch, and Theodora W. Thayer. An examination of these artists’ training and works enriches our understanding of the role the League played in the miniature revival. Laura Coombs Hills studied three years with Helen M. Knowlton and two months at the Cowles Art School in Boston, and in 1882 she attended Chase’s portrait class for three months at the League.³² Chase’s criticism no doubt refined her sense of color and of composition and helped her develop breadth in her brushwork, which she applied to the miniature medium on her own in the early 1890s, without any formal education in painting with watercolor on ivory. Her versatile paint handling and strikingly economical palette is evident in The Fire Opal (Grace Mutuell) (1899), one of several miniatures Hills left to the Boston Museum of Fine Arts (fig. 8).³³ Lydia Field Emmet traveled to Paris in 1884 to begin her studies at the Julian Academy, and returned after one winter season to the United States. From 1889 to 1895 she took classes at the League with Chase, Mowbray, Cox, and Robert Reid. She, like Fuller, was invited to provide a mural for the Women’s Building at the World’s Columbian Exposition, and during her career she painted oil portraits and designed stained glass windows at a large scale, while also drawing illustrations and building a reputation as a miniaturist.³⁴ Mabel R. Welch (1871-1958) overlapped Emmet’s time at the League from 1891-95, and took classes with Chase, Mowbray, Cox, Reid, Twachtman, and DuMond. She served on the Board of Control in 1895. She then went to Paris, where she studied with American painter Charles A. Lasar and others. Welch became a member of both the ASMP and the PSMP and exhibited regularly at their exhibitions.³⁵

Alice Beckington came to New York City from Missouri to study at the League, and acquired a solid grounding in drawing in J. Carroll Beckwith’s Antique during the entire 1888-1889 season, and in Cox’s Antique for one month in the spring. She also practiced her drawing skills in six months of the Life Sketch class with clothed models.³⁶ Like Emmet, she then traveled to Paris to study at the Julian Academy, and individually with Lasar. Beckington said “that it was during the four years when she was working in oils in Paris that she became interested in miniature painting—and that in this work she was self-taught…She believes that the great principles of art that obtain in oil painting should apply to miniature work as well; and she paints her miniatures in the same manner as she would paint in oils.”³⁷ Her portrait of Rosina Cox Boardman (1914) displays her abilities to represent form convincingly and to capture a likeness (fig. 9).³⁸ The subject of the miniature was one of Beckington’s students, and it was as an early instructor of miniature painting, together with Theodora W. Thayer, Lucia Fairchild Fuller, and Mabel R. Welch, that she was especially influential. Thayer trained in Boston, but she became integrated into the art world of New York City, and though self-taught in miniature painting she was one of the first to teach it at the League.

Instruction in miniature painting at the League was inconsistent during its first two winter seasons, before its offering settled into more of a routine. In November, 1903 the Board of Control wrote Theodora Thayer asking her to instruct a Miniature class, to begin December 1, and in preparation for it the Board appointed a monitor. Thayer was already teaching a similar class for 1903-04 at the New York School of Art—also known as the Chase School. One critic responded positively almost immediately: “Recognizing that the miniature in America has come to stay, the Art Students’ League opened December last its first life class in miniature painting, under the direction of Miss Thayer. To be a successful painter in miniature requires exactly the same rude preparatory study as to become a life size portrait painter in any medium.”³⁹ The League’s class must have been a success, because in March, 1904 the Board decided to offer Thayer the Miniature class for the 1904-05 winter season, with the understanding that she would teach exclusively at the League. Thayer turned down the League’s offer, presumably anticipating her renewal at the New York School of Art for 1904-05. In April, 1904 the Board offered the class with the same understanding of exclusivity to Rhoda Holmes Nicholls, a watercolor painter who eventually taught a Saturday course in that medium at the League for many years. The offer to Nicholls likewise did not bear fruit, and in May the Board made inquiries with Lucia Fairchild Fuller and Laura Coombs Hills about teaching the Miniature class under the same terms. Fuller was given the position for the 1904-05 season.⁴⁰

Something went awry, and two months into fall coursework, at the end of November, the Board discussed replacing Fuller until January with May Fairchild, another League-educated miniaturist.⁴¹ Three weeks later the Board decided to write Fuller to ask if she would be able to give her class criticisms, and to notify her that if she would be unable then she would be asked to cancel her contract. Evidently she was unable, and at the end of December the Board inquired with Thayer and Hills about taking over the class, ultimately deciding to hire Thayer. Thayer was now back at the helm of the Miniature class, but not for long. In March, 1905 the Board decided Alice Beckington should replace Thayer—possibly because Thayer was also still teaching at the New York School of Art. It might seem like there was some friction between Thayer and the Board at this point in time, but this was not so; in mid-April the Board decided to hire Thayer to return to teaching in the fall. Perhaps in an effort to expect the unexpected, the Board simultaneously agreed to engage Beckington as a substitute. Advertisements listing Thayer among the fall instructors appeared in newspapers, but the Board’s planning paid off, since Thayer died unexpectedly on August 5, 1905. Beckington stepped in to teach the Miniature course for 1905-06.⁴²

From the fall of 1905 until the spring of 1916 Alice Beckington taught the Miniature class at the League, either alone or with assistance, bringing consistency and stability to the instruction. At times, Beckington shared instruction with Fuller. In October, 1910 Beckington resigned her teaching position for the fall, to be resumed January 1, 1911, and the Board offered the position to Fuller. Fuller ultimately taught during the spring as well, but Beckington was back in the classroom in the fall. Fuller’s name appears with Beckington’s in the League’s print advertisement in January, 1912, so for 1911-12 once again they shared instructing responsibilities. Both Beckington and Fuller apparently were popular; in March, 1914 members of the Board consulted with the Miniature class about whom they wanted to teach the following winter season. The Minutes record that the Board decided to engage Fuller for the fall, but the 1914-15 course catalogue lists both artists as co-instructors.⁴³

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