Museum accessions.(portrait miniatures collections of art museums)

There are a lot of new faces in the Department of American Paintings and Sculpture at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City, thanks to the recent acquisition of the Gloria Manney Collection of American portrait miniatures. The museum's holdings of these tiny but powerful, personal mementoes are now among the finest anywhere.

Gloria Manney and her husband, Richard, collected in a variety of areas--including Hudson River school painting, John Henry Belter furniture, and American jewelry--but she was long drawn to miniatures. Her grandparents gave her her first ones when she was only four years old and in her youth she acquired several more. From this beginning the Manneys created a collection that is comprehensive in date and geography, ranging from about 1760 to 1860 and representing artists working from Boston to New Orleans.

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Intended to be held close and viewed in private, portrait miniatures are one of the most intimate art forms known, painted to reflect the deep emotional bonds between family members and other loved ones. Many were painted in remembrance of friends or relatives who had died, but the three examples from the Manney Collection illustrated here represent living bonds. John Wood Dodge painted the likeness of his brother Edward S. Dodge (illustrated at left) for exhibition at the National Academy of Design in New York City in 1835. A reviewer for the New-York Mirror called it "a truly fine specimen of Mr. Dodge's skill," and it is indeed a most sensitive portrait of a beloved brother. Remarkably, the Manney Collection also includes Edward Dodge's miniature portrait of John, painted a year or two later.

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Certainly a most intimate and unusual miniature self-portrait (illustrated above) is Sarah Good-ridge's Beauty Revealed (Self-portrait), which she is believed to have painted for the statesman Daniel Webster. A homebody, Goodridge traveled outside the Boston area only twice, both times to visit Webster in Washington, D. C., first in 1828 after his first wife had died and then in 1841 after he had separated from his second. The miniature, with its almost palpable sensuality, dates from the first visit. It remained in Webster's family until the 1980s.

By the time John Henry Brown painted the unidentified Boy illustrated below in 1854, the golden age of miniature painting was drawing to a close, replaced in large part by photography. Brown continued to thrive, however, because he managed to capture the accuracy of photography in likenesses that are endowed with a greater sense of life and poetry than early photography generally allowed