The Art and Science of Portrait Miniatures

Assisting Dr. Jennifer Streb with her sabbatical research on the JCMA’s collection of portrait miniatures. Responsible for collecting all JCMA documentation on the portrait miniatures into one accessible document. Spent two semesters independently researching European portrait miniatures; the research was used for creating label copy for the exhibition and also contributed to the exhibition catalog. I also accompanied Dr. Streb on multiple excursions to perform scientific analysis on the miniatures.

2013

During the first year of this project, I was tasked with creating an extensive spreadsheet with all of the accession, appraisal and conservation records for seventy-two portrait miniatures in the Juniata College Museum of Art's collection. This project involved many hours of data entry and organization to ensure that all of the information was imported correctly. This spreadsheet was later used for cross referencing during our scientific analysis trips and when we were selecting which objects would go on display.

2014

While working on the spreadsheet, Dr. Streb asked me to select a few miniatures to start doing some more in depth research. I chose three miniatures initially. A supposed miniature of Mary Queen of Scots, a miniature possibly attributed to Thomas Gainsborough, and then a larger enamel titled "Nude Born on Ocean Wave." For the next semester I did extensive research on the attributed artists and subjects to try to ascertain whether or not the attributions were correct. In the end I detirmined that it was unlikely that the Gainsborough was actually painted by Gainsborough. But I did find a painting by Gainsborough that looked extremely similar to the miniature which led me to believe the miniature was painted as a copy.

Summer 2014

During the summer of 2014 Dr. Richard Hark (Chemistry professor at Juniata), Dr. Streb, another student and myself took a selection of portrait miniatures to Penn State University and the GE Lab in Lewistown PA to do some non-invasive scientific analysis. At Penn State we used a Raman microscope and at the GE Lab we used an X-Ray and CT machine. 

Winter 2015

After a semester abroad, I joined Dr. Hark, Dr. Streb and Kate Passannante at Winterthur in Wilmington DE. Winterthur has an amazing scientific lab on their site and then allowed us to join them to analyze the miniatures using their x-ray fluorescence machine. Dr. Hark and I teamed up to do the XRF and Dr. Streb and Kate worked together doing more Raman analysis. After two days we had analyzed dozens of miniatures. The charts below show some of the XRF results. 

2014-2015

Most of the work for the exhibition was during the spring of 2015 and fall of 2016. During the spring I worked on a paper to present at the Juniata Liberal Arts Symposium. The paper focused on my research on the "Mrs. Siddons" or "Mrs. Graham" miniature. But it also included some background on portrait minatures themselves.

During this time, I was also helping Dr. Streb write the labels for the minatures to prepare for the September opening of the exhibition. Kate and Dr. Hark were writing the scientific labels. While writing labels, Dr. Streb and Dr. Hark were working on the exhibition catalog. Dr. Streb used some of my research in the catalog so I was lucky enough to get cited in the footnotes!

Fall 2015

During the fall semester of 2016, myself and my fellow gallery manager Sarah Elder, worked with the Museum Practicum class to design the display and install the exhibition. The first things to get installed were the objects that we borrowed from Winterthur, and then we were free to design the exhibition with the advice of our new Director Kathryn Blake and Dr. Streb. We decided to install the exhibition chronologically to tell the history of miniatures. We then interspersed the science panels accordingly. 

September 2016 Opening

The Art & Science of Portrait Miniatures finally opened in September of 2015!

In addition to all of the in gallery work, I also delivered a presentation at the Juniata College Liberal Arts Symposium on the research I completed. Similar presentations were delivered at PCA/ACA in 2016 and MAAM in 2016.