The English Miniature by John Murdock, et al. (review)

54 Book Reviews holes and lumps in order to gain more light, after which I search for a synthesis of the whole." No doubt Rodin (1840-1917) was a controversial sculptor and a cross-section of Butler's collection confirms this. Rodin's 'realism' has a fascination for present day artists interested in realism, neorealism, and superrealism. Rodin, through his own concept of realism, managed to destroy the standards of sculptural exactitude (the classical approach) and paved the way for abstract art. There is significant interest today in Rodin's sculptures, perhaps stimulated by the magnificent exhibition, 'Rodin Rediscovered', at the National Gallery of Art in Washington D.C., from June 1981 through January 1982. This continued interest appears to be international, for in India there was also an exhibition of Rodin's sculptures and drawings at the National Gallery of Modern Art, New Delhi, from 27 November 1982 through IS January 1983. The topicality and relevance of Ruth Butler's study is very great. The English Miniature. John Murdock, Jimm Murrell, Patrick J. Noon and Roy Strong. Yale University Press, New Haven and London, 1981. 231 pp., 267 illus. 40 pp., colour. Cloth $40.00 (£20.00); paper $14.95 (£7.95). ISBN: 0-300-02769-9. Reviewed by Carson I. A. Ritchie* This book was written to accompany an exhibition of miniatures from the collections of the Victoria and Albert Museum, South Kensington, held in America during 1981 and 1982. A glance at the picture credits shows many fine miniatures in American collections, but those collections, like those of Britain, are widely scattered. Many of the best miniatures are still in private hands in great country houses. The English Miniature assembles through illustrations a gallery larger and more representative than any wewillever see with mortal eyes. Even a group of miniatures that possibly survive in an East German museum have been brought together in photographs. No great collection, no principal school, and no major master have been omitted. This is a book for art lovers and collectors, who feel a debt of gratitude to the international team that assembled it-the Curator of Prints and Drawings in the Yale Center for British Art and the Director and two Deputy Keepers of the Victoria and Albert. Jim Murrell's introduction to the techniques of painting, from the fairly straightforward task of 'limning' on vellum to the technically different one of painting a portrait on slippery ivory, isso interesting that one would like more. Why is nothing said about the technique of enameled miniatures? Roy Strong examines the family tree of limning from the Flemish illuminators introduced from Burgundy by the late Yorkist and early Tudor kings down to the emergence of possibly the greatest masters of all, Nicholas Hilliard and Isaac Oliver. Dr. Strong neatly ties the connections between limning and king-worship, religion, renaissance esoteric imagery, and models of the universe. Readers of the Shakespeare will remember that not everyone bought miniatures for the right reasons. "Mine uncle is King of Denmark, and those that would make mouths at him, while my father lived, give twenty, forty, fifty, an hundred ducats apiece for his picture in little." John Murdock brings us down to the end of the seventeenth century with a review of the baroque masters in a chapter that does justice to the controversies surrounding some of them, without becoming heavy. Tantalizingly brief chapters by Patrick Noon on the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries conclude the book. Could it not have been brought up to date without dismissing everything painted after 1934 as wishy-washy and photographic? Comparisons between ancients and moderns are instructive, but in default of any help from the authors, readers must make their own. A visit to the Private Viewof the Royal Society of Miniature Painters at the Mall Galleries in November confronts us with much that must have been familiar to all miniaturists of the past: the question of whether to paint on ivory, or vellum, the difficulty of hitting off a royal likeness. the mystery of how the other lady gets her effects (a mystery that remains impenetrable even when her picture has been examined through a magnifying glass), the problem of...