From the nature of the process miniature-painting requires great refinement of taste, dexterity and delicacy of hand, and patience in the artist. It recommends itself by the extreme softness, delicacy, and brilliancy of colour, and the portability and durability of its produc tions; and it has been pursued with great diligence and success in most countries, but especially in England, France and Italy. From the first the art has been successfully prosecuted in England. It appears to have been introduced by foreigners; but from the time of Nicholas Hilliard, limner to Queen Elizabeth and her successor, who learned the art from Holbein, England has always possessed miniature painters at least on a level with the best of their contemporaries. Among the imme diate successors of Hilliard were Isaac and Peter Oliver, from the former of whom, in some respects still unrivalled as a miniature painter, we have portraits of several of the most illustrious of the remarkable men of his time. To them succeeded Alexander Hoskins and Samuel Cooper, and the latter, scarce inferior even to Isaac Oliver, has preserved the best likenesses of several of the most famous of the Commonwealth men, including Oliver Cromwell and John Milton. We need not continue the list : it will be enough to say that, whilst English miniature painters have always occupied a foremost place in their branch of- art, it has been admitted even by foreign critics, that the English miniatures of the last and present generation unquestion ably take precedence of those of the Continent. But whilst the artists have secured so honourable a position, the art itself appears doomed to give way before the advance of photography, as the miniature painting of the medievalists did before printing. Some of the best of
our living miniature-painters have wholly or in part abandoned the practice of this branch of painting, and others of an inferior order are devoting themselves to painting " photographic miniatures," or minia tures of which the basis is a feebly developed photographic positive. It is however to be hoped that fashion may show sufficient encourage ment to the true miniature painter to preserve from decay this delight ful branch of art. The practice of painting photographic miniatures can hardly fail to develope a mechanical mode of painting which can scarcely rank as a fine art, however advantageous the study of photo graphic portraits maybe, as an aid, to the miniature painter.
We cannot refer to a collection of portrait miniatures in either of our national museums ; but several private collections have been formed in emulation, and partly from the debris, ofithe famous Straw berry Hill collection of Horace Walpole. Among the most celebrated are those of the Dukes of Portland, Buccleuch, Hamilton, Marlborough, and Northumberland, which embrace a large number of specimens from the Tudor period downwards. A choice selection from these and other collections was brought together at the Manchester Art Treaiiires' Exhibition of 1857;:and another, but comparativelfprivate exhibition, was made partly from the same collections by the Archaeological Insti tute, London, in the summer of 1860.