Miniature and Small-Scale Paintings

Paintings made to be held or seen at arm's length, from portrait miniatures and Persianate manuscript pages to tiny contemporary pictures.

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About

Small paintings ask for close looking and reward it with detail that larger formats cannot hold. At the Timurid and Safavid courts, painters worked on paper with very fine brushes and mineral pigments, setting brightly clothed figures into patterned architecture. Mughal and Rajput artists in India developed the tradition further from the 16th century.

In Europe the word miniature comes from minium, the red lead used in decorating manuscripts, rather than from size, but it came to mean tiny portraits worn in lockets. Nicholas Hilliard painted Elizabeth I and her courtiers in watercolour on vellum, and from the early 18th century many miniaturists worked on ivory. Adam Elsheimer's The Flight into Egypt (1609), painted on a copper plate about 40 centimetres across, holds a whole starry night. Artists including Shahzia Sikander and Aisha Khalid, both trained in miniature painting in Lahore, have carried the discipline into contemporary work.