A GENTEEL CUSTOM

LONG before the camera made possible the snapshot in the wallet, a man who cared to. carry about the likeness of his wife or children had to commission an artist. The demand for such likenesses, to hang on watch fobs or dangle in gold lockets, fostered the exacting art of painting watercolor portraits on small circles and squares of ivory. The genteel custom flourished in New England in the mid-18th century, died out a century later. Last week, in conjunction with the Colonial Dames of Massachusetts, the Boston Museum of Fine Arts put on view a choice selection of 210 American miniatures.

On the tiny slabs of ivory, some no more than half an inch in diameter, are preserved the faces of major Colonial, Revolutionary and post-Revolutionary figures as painted by America's most skillful miniaturists (opposite). Some of them pack immense values into a minuscule space--accuracy of the likeness, deftness of characterization, clarity of form, purity of texture, a glow of the ivory through the delicate colors to enhance the flesh tones. They were achieved with a meticulousness that required as many as 50 sittings for a portrait, demanded thousands of stipple or hatch brush strokes so infinitesimal that they can be seen only through a magnifying glass. With a head painted on so small a scale, the painter was in major trouble if he made even a minor slip. Technically, the art demanded perfection.

The first dated New England miniature (176-, the last number being obscure) was the small, three-dimensional self-portrait by John Singleton Copley, whose father-in-law owned some of the tea destroyed by the Boston Tea Party but whose locket cases were made by Tea-Dumper Paul Revere. The best American miniatures were made by Edward Greene Malbone, who with precision of draftsmanship and a unique harmony of colors could portray the lofty assurance of Philanthropist Thomas Russell, wealthy New England merchant, or the visionary romanticism of Painter Washington Allston. Fine miniatures were also done by Sarah Goodridge, who painted the luminous portrait of aging, crusty Painter Gilbert Stuart, and by Charles Willson Peale, who did the study of phlegmatic-looking John Lowell of the Boston Lowells, member of the Continental Congress and a U.S. judge. Many of the miniatures, and not the worst, went unsigned, like the deft portrait of youthful Navyman Oliver Hazard Perry. A miniaturist celebrated in other fields was Robert Fulton, who painted Perry's wife, but went on to make the first successful steamboat.

Despite its iridescent charm and aura of good breeding, the miniature became a lost art with the advent of the cheaper, more accurate, less demanding photograph. In its presence, one expert ruefully noted, the miniature "was like a bird before a snake: it was fascinated--even to the fatal point of imitation--and then it was swallowed."

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