Art: Paintings in Little

A century behind the times, a few steady-fingered men and women of good family have gone on painting miniatures, with the result that last week the American Society of Miniature Painters was able to hold its 35th exhibition in Manhattan. Months ago each artist bought little slabs of ivory, preferably from tusks of a live elephant. The ivory was smoothed with pumice stone, soaked in water until pliable. When pressed stiff and flat each slab was cut for size. Omitting the gum, glycerine or honey the ancients used to make paint stick to chicken skin, mutton bone, vellum or copper, 20th Century miniaturists daubed on pure water colors. Then they had something they could sell, if a portrait, for from $200 to $800, if a still life, for $25 up. Last week droves of old ladies pressed their noses close to the Grand Central Art Galleries’ walls, noting the meticulous fineness of the painting, the absence of brush marks.

Four of the best U. S. miniaturists showed their year’s work. Outstanding was a clear, shining portrait of a cameo-featured young woman in a ruff collar, by last year’s medal winner, Artemis Tavshanjian, 29-year-old U. S.-born Armenian. Last week’s winner was Mabel Welch, for her painstaking profile of an old man. Margaret Foote Hawley offered a prim, pale portrait of Rosemary, wife of Poet Stephen Vincent Benét. Nearly everything in the show, marvelously smooth and glowing with flesh colors, was pretty enough to be enlarged for a popular magazine cover.

Totally invisible to laymen was the rebellion that glared out here & there from the walls. Called the “free method,” it consisted of a minute variation in technique, which permitted a few brush strokes to show. Chief disciple of this revolt in an art which Samuel Pepys correctly called “painting in little” was able Rosina Cox Boardman with two landscapes. A Meadow swam with a bright liquid green, simple masses of purple hills. Barn in the Valley showed a dazzling vista in miniature. In each the stroke of the brush was faintly apparent to a sharp-focused eye.