Thursday, November 3, 2022

Miniature Portraits on Ivory at the Louvre (19th Century)

Jean-Antoine Laurent
Portrait of a Nursing Mother
1803
watercolor on ivory
Musée du Louvre

Jean-Baptiste Jacques Augustin
Portrait of artist Antoine-Denis Chaudet
1804
watercolor and gouache on ivory
Musée du Louvre

Philippe Berger
Portrait of tenor Jean Elleviou
ca. 1810
watercolor on ivory
Musée du Louvre

Louis-Marie Autissier
Portrait of Henriette Campan née Genet
(originally a Lady-in-Waiting to Marie Antoinette,
then after the Revolution a schoolmistress)
ca. 1810
watercolor on ivory
Musée du Louvre

Paul-Joseph Anastasi
Self Portrait
1810
watercolor on ivory
Musée du Louvre

Charles-Guillaume-Alexandre Bourgeois
Portrait of artist Fanny Morlot
ca. 1812
watercolor on ivory
Musée du Louvre

Louis-Bertin Parant
Portrait of artist Dominique Vivant-Denon
ca. 1810-20
watercolor on ivory
(imitating cameo)
Musée du Louvre

Aimée Thibault
Portrait of the King of Rome
kneeling before a Statue of the Virgin

ca. 1814
watercolor on ivory
Musée du Louvre

Charles-Étienne Leguay
Portrait of artist Marie Victoire Jacquotot
ca. 1818
watercolor on ivory
Musée du Louvre

Lizinka Aimée Zoé de Mirbel
Portrait of Pauline Boyer
1819
watercolor on ivory
Musée du Louvre

Anthelme-François Lagrenée
Portrait of dramatist Pierre-Antoine Lebrun
ca. 1820
watercolor on ivory
(imitating cameo)
Musée du Louvre

André-Léon Larue (called Mansion)
Portrait of a Young Woman
ca. 1820
watercolor on ivory
Musée du Louvre


Étienne Bouchardy
Portrait of a Young Woman
1828
watercolor on ivory
Musée du Louvre

François Meuret
Portrait of a Woman
ca. 1830
watercolor on ivory
Musée du Louvre

Emanuel Thomas Peter
Portrait of Mathilde von Clary und Aldringen
1831
watercolor on ivory
Musée du Louvre

"In painting a portrait the artist aims at nothing more than that a certain individual should be recognized in his image.  To achieve this, he studies to repeat with extreme precision the particular features, nay, even the deformities, of his model.  Thus the usual encomium on a portrait (it is he himself) serves, in the best possible manner, to define that spirit of identity, repetition, reality which is peculiar to this kind of image; those words thus understood, and not taken in their strict sense, are applicable, in general theory, either to imitation or its works, according as the pleasure derived from them is more or less founded on sensations that are more or less restricted to physical effects."

"Not to lose sight of the comparison, there is assuredly no pleasure more limited than that which is usually the result of a portrait.  If we abstract from it all the interest that individual and public feeling, or the talent of the artist clothes it with, we shall to a certainty find that the mind and the imagination have but small share in such kind of imitation; and for this reason, because the appositions to be brought about are few in number, and the operation of the mind in comparing very slightly active."

"From this instance, to which no one will find it difficult to add many others, we may conclude that imitation, when exercised in the sphere most circumscribed by reality, then contributes most to that pleasure which we have termed the pleasure of the senses, which may truly be said to be the only one that the vulgar require in the arts, and moreover the only one they receive from them." 

– Antoine Chrysostome Quatremère de Quincy, On the End of Imitation in the Fine Arts (1823), translated by J.C. Kent (1837)