Portrait miniatures: the impact of photography
Queen Victoria's miniaturist, Sir William Charles Ross, was the last great miniature painter. His fashionably large miniatures looked like oil paintings. But this effect took painstaking work and few could afford Ross. Other top-class miniaturists were equally expensive, even Alfred Edward Chalon with his elegant, light style.
Photography, introduced in 1839, 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.
At the end of the century, however, there was a brief revival of interest in miniature painting with the establishment in 1896 of the Royal Society of Miniature Painters.
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Queen Elizabeth II: Portraits by Cecil Beaton (Hardback)
Photographer, costume designer, avid diarist - Cecil Beaton was also a 'romantic royalist' whose glittering photographs of Queen Elizabeth II became a…
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