Enfilade

Recently added to caa.reviews:

Stephen Lloyd and Kim Sloan, The Intimate Portrait: Drawings, Miniatures, and Pastels from Ramsay to Lawrence, exhibition catalogue (Edinburgh and London: National Galleries of Scotland and British Museum, 2009). 272 pages, ISBN: 9781844543984, £25.

Reviewed by Robin Nicholson, Virginia Museum of Fine Arts; posted 1 December 2010.

The 2008 exhibition that this catalogue accompanied was instigated by the British Museum’s acquisition of an important drawing by Sir Thomas Lawrence, “Mary Hamilton” (1789). Cover-girl of the catalogue and an astonishing tour-de-force by the gifted nineteen-year-old artist, this work reminded authors Stephen Lloyd and Kim Sloan of just how ubiquitous miniatures and portrait drawings were in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries—particularly at the Royal Academy—and how central they were to the contemporary debates on the purpose and significance of portraiture. As Lloyd (of the Scottish National Portrait Gallery) and Sloan (of the British Museum) admit, this publication only begins to address some of the pressing issues of the genre. Their goal is “to open up the discourse . . . looking at them as physical objects as well as symbolic ones, asking how and why they were made, commissioned, whether for pleasure or as gifts, where they were kept or hung or worn—displayed, encased or bejeweled” (9). Although it can be deemed only a partial success, the catalogue is nonetheless a beautiful, erudite, and informative publication. . . .

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