05/29/2026
The Art of Portrait Miniatures
In the 18th century, the most intimate art form was also the smallest. A portrait miniature was a tiny painting, rarely more than two or three inches, made not to hang on a wall but to be held in the hand or worn as jewelry close to the body. The Peale portraits of Martha Washington and her children were smaller still, each painted likeness just an inch and a half tall.
The craft was painstaking. Artists worked in watercolor on a wafer-thin slice of ivory, prized because its glow gave skin a lifelike warmth. Because pigment would barely cling to the smooth surface, the image was built from thousands of fine strokes, delicate hatching and stippling laid down with a steady hand and the finest brushes, lines finer than a hair.
They were tokens of love and remembrance, set in gold and worn as pendants, brooches, or bracelets. If you look closely at these portraits, you can see the small holes in the frames that allowed them to be attached to chains or ribbons and worn as jewelry, often at the wrist as bracelets. The back often hid a braided lock of hair or a loved one’s initials. A miniature given in affection could become, after a death, an object of mourning, the same small face carrying both love and grief across a lifetime.
This is exactly what the Peale miniatures became. Painted in 1772 at the height of the family’s happiness and worn by Martha as bracelets at the wrist, they turned, within a few short years, into her most personal keepsakes of the children she lost. Today all three survive in the collection of the Mount Vernon Ladies’ Association.
Portrait miniatures by Charles Willson Peale, 1772, watercolor on ivory. Collection of the Mount Vernon Ladies’ Association.
