Hyperrealism with Tom Mulliner

The Art of the Intimate Scale Chapter 12: Contemporary Miniature Painting The 21st Century, Global Scene & The Future of the Form Chapter 12 of 12 100% Contemporary miniature painting is more alive, more diverse, and more globally distributed than at any point in its history. Understanding the present state of the form — its practitioners, its debates, its institutions, and its future — is the final requirement for genuine expertise. The Contemporary Global Scene The portrait miniature today is practised on every continent. The major centres of activity — Britain, the United States, Australia, Canada, and increasingly India and parts of Southeast Asia — each have their own institutional structures, exhibitions, and aesthetic traditions. The RMS remains the most historically significant institution, but it exists within a genuinely global community. International competitions — including the prestigious Miniature Art Society of Florida and the Hilliard Society exhibitions — have cre...

The Art of the Intimate Scale Chapter 11: Connoisseurship & Authentication How to Look, How to Date, How to Attribute — The Scholar's Toolkit Chapter 11 of 12 92% Connoisseurship is the ability to look at a miniature and understand what you are seeing — to read its date, its authorship, its condition, and its significance from the evidence it presents. This is the scholarly skill that distinguishes the expert from the enthusiast. Reading the Support: Vellum vs. Ivory The most immediate dating tool is the support. Vellum as the primary substrate places a miniature before approximately 1700 (with exceptions). Ivory suggests a date from c.1700 onwards. The transition was not instantaneous — some English artists continued to use vellum into the 1720s — but it is a reliable first indicator. The condition of the vellum or ivory reveals much. Vellum that has been exposed to humidity will show characteristic cockling (undulation) where it has expanded and contracted against its rigid b...

The Art of the Intimate Scale Chapter 10: 20th Century: Survival & Key Practitioners Modernism's Challenge, Wartime Continuity & the Miniature's Quiet Persistence Chapter 10 of 12 83% The 20th century presented the portrait miniature with a challenge more profound than photography: the entire intellectual framework of modernism, which held that traditional representational art in historical media was not merely unfashionable but ideologically suspect. The miniature survived — but the story of how and why is one of the most instructive in the history of any art form. Modernism and the Miniature: An Uneasy Relationship The Modernist revolution in art — from Impressionism through Cubism to Abstract Expressionism — was fundamentally hostile to the values that defined the portrait miniature: likeness, technical conservatism, small scale, personal intimacy. The critical establishment of the early 20th century largely ignored or actively denigrated miniature painting as a reli...