Your first thought about the landscape paintings that dominated the American art market in the nineteenth century is probably about the grand ones: mammoth canvases by Frederic Edwin Church or Albert Bierstadt, seven feet wide and as gigantic in impact. But a new exhibition at the Redwood Library and Athenaeum in Newport, Rhode Island, subverts these expectations. Presenting more than eighty paintings, drawings, and photographs, the show recovers a previously untold art historical story, revealing the many ways in which small pictures were big business in nineteenth-century America, related to but independent from their larger siblings. These fully finished, miniature-scaled landscapes were used to market artists’ skills in an economical way, presented as small gifts or tokens of affection, and purchased as souvenirs of distant sites. They were sent through the mail as a means of communicating work accomplished, daubed on the backs of miniature playing cards as proof of painterly prowess, executed on small flat stones to serve as paperweights, and grouped together in precisely matted portfolios to advertise the scope and fluency of a painter’s craft.
The market for miniature landscapes by some well-known artists—and many less-familiar ones—emerged alongside that of more traditionally sized landscape paintings in the 1830s and ’40s. By 1866 the Saturday Press in New York reported an exhibition of landscape miniatures for sale in Jones’s Bookstore at 843 Broadway, highlighting “the demand for these beautiful little pictures is such that hundreds of imitations of them are in the market.”1 These “beautiful little pictures” were painted by a Brooklyn-based doctor-turned-artist named Edward Ruggles. He was one of the few self-described miniature painters of the period, a man who “resolutely refused to paint anything but the smallest pieces.”2 Ruggles’s diminutive landscapes like Autumn by the Water (Fig. 1) typically measured about four by six inches. Notable for their handling of light and atmosphere, as well as their rich coloring, these little pictures—dubbed “Ruggles Gems”—were in high demand as popular decorations for the drawing rooms of New York and New England. In December of 1868, readers of the New York Times were encouraged to seek out his small paintings “especially at this holiday season, when no more beautiful or acceptable gift can be found than a ‘Ruggles Gem.’”3
Part of what made these little paintings attractive to buyers was their affordability. Quicker to paint and making use of fewer materials, miniature landscapes allowed the buyers of the emerging middle class to acquire art at a rapid clip. For artists like Ruggles, painting small was a financially sound strategy. By 1867 “the eagerness to obtain [Ruggles’s] pictures almost taxed to the last point his extraordinary facility of production,” reported the New York Times.4 It was at this moment that Louis Prang’s popular lithography firm made a nine-print set of Ruggles’s Gems (see Fig. 2), advertising them as “the best specimens of chromo-lithography,” “perfect landscape-pictures in miniature,” and “genuine ‘gems’ of color effect: sparkling, attractive, and satisfactory to the eye.”5
But there was more behind the appeal of miniature-scaled landscapes than their budget-friendly price tags. By distilling huge vistas of the natural world into portable pictures, the small landscape format became increasingly desirable during the nineteenth century, a period of westward expansion when images of the American landscape became essential to the development of the young nation’s identity.
Take, for example, a tiny view of Table Rock and Niagara Falls by John Williamson, which measures a teensy 1 ⅝ by 2 ½ inches—about half the size of a standard power outlet (Figs. 3, 3a). In the foreground, a figure in native dress stands on a ledge silhouetted by the white wall of water behind. This souvenir from the most frequently pictured landmark in nineteenth-century America underlines the impulse to describe vast, overwhelming, panoramic vistas in singular, tiny images. More insidiously, it represents the visual dimensions of Manifest Destiny—a way for the Euro-Americans by whom and for whom such pictures were produced to claim ownership over the homelands of many American Indian nations, such as the Attiwonderonk and Haudenosaunee peoples of the Niagara region. “Miniaturizing the world around us is a way of achieving dominion over it,” writes the art historian Courtney Leigh Harris. “Creating a miniature of something from nature can be a method of ordering the world and gaining knowledge about it.”6 By distilling Niagara Falls into a tiny picture, the consumer can take in the whole view in a single glance. Intellectually, such an act of compression allows one to understand, grasp, or “own” something nebulous, enormous, or un-possessable.
In the history of Western art, miniature painting originated in the illuminated manuscripts of the Middle Ages and quickly found its most popular expression in the portrait miniature. These pocket-sized portraits were framed in glass and precious metals, carried on the body, and worn as jewelry. Women were more likely to become prominent miniature painters, as the genre was viewed as gentle—not requiring the same force and ambition as full-scale work, and therefore more approachable for amateur painters. Portrait miniatures became extraordinarily popular in eighteenth-century America, but their prominence waned at the turn of the nineteenth century and expired altogether with the introduction of the daguerreotype in 1839. This same invention helped shape the new demand for miniature landscape paintings. Daguerreotypes offered fixed views into tiny worlds filled with lush detail (Fig. 4), and inspired painters to enhance the detail in their own works. Aaron Draper Shattuck’s Glimpse Through the Trees is one example (Fig. 6). The painting’s romanticizing circular form frames a distant view toward a verdant hillside speckled with livestock and capped with a white church steeple. This format also highlights the detailed trees in the foreground, which bow to follow the curve of the frame. The attraction of miniature pictures like this one lies in the wonder we feel when we grasp the skill of a painter who could produce something so small and yet so meticulously rendered.
Paintings filled with such minute entrancements enticed viewers to move in close and scrutinize the image. They were designed to elicit slow, intimate, and contemplative engagement, making them perfect decorations for the quietly refined American parlor. The critic and philosopher Susan Stewart argues that to look at a miniature picture properly—that is, to really see it—a viewer must temporarily adopt a microscope-like mode of vision. Looked at carefully, these miniatures generate a fundamental shift in thinking and perceiving.7
One of the best-known formats for early landscape photography, stereography, generated diminutive images designed to inspire a similar kind of focus. Stereographers used a special camera to capture a view from two ever-so-slightly-different angles so that, when examined through a special viewing instrument called a stereoscope, the two flat images are made to appear as a single three-dimensional object (Fig. 5). Stereographs, like other miniature landscapes, were designed to inspire deep focus, creating a transportive encounter between object and viewer.
Even Thomas Cole, the founding father of the American landscape tradition, took part in the miniature game. His Italian Scenery at Four Times of Day (Figs. 7, 7a, 7b) is a tour de force of painting—and it’s only four inches high. On a long rectangular panel, Cole experimented with the changing light effects of dawn, midday, dusk, and night. Much like the popular moving panoramas that traveled from city to city during the nineteenth century, the composition reveals the artist’s interest in understanding and visualizing the progression of time.
A follower of Cole, Jasper Francis Cropsey also created miniature worlds. Smaller than the palm of your hand, his View of the Hudson (Figs. 8, 8a) was likely painted from memory or from past sketches while the artist lived in London. Inscribed “to WJ Barett ESQ with best regards,” it evidences a whole swath of miniature-scaled landscape paintings: those given as gifts and tokens of friendship. In like manner, the miniscule and untitled landscape in Figures 9 and 9a was carefully composed on the back of the artist’s calling card—a gift to “Miss Cole,” Thomas Cole’s sister, Sarah.
The most familiar application for small-scale landscapes in the nineteenth century was as models for larger compositions. An artist would experiment with a view or perspective at a smaller scale, working through the challenges of the image before enlarging it. Such is the case with Robert Seldon Duncanson’s five-inch-high Emerald Pond (Fig. 10), the clear precursor to his eighteen-inch-high Shenandoah Valley (Fig. 11). In the larger composition Duncanson adds figures for both scale and narrative import—telling the story of a high-mountain pond near Virginia’s Massanutten Mountain, a site frequented by runaway slaves.8 A free Black man, Duncanson was one of very few professional artists to paint views of the American South during the nineteenth century.
Working in a vein similar to Duncanson, in 1875 William Trost Richards painted his first miniature watercolor in what would become a ten-year series (Fig. 12a). These three-by-four-inch cards were made for the artist’s patron, George Whitney (see Fig. 12b). Sent through the mail, the “coupons,” as the artist dubbed them, facilitated a rich ongoing exchange between artist and patron by, as the art historian Kimia Shahi has explained, “providing Whitney with mobile ‘samples’ of Richards’s work while the artist was away from his studio in Philadelphia, where both men primarily resided.”9 Like financial coupons, they were exchanged as a kind of currency, repayment by the artist for the funding he received from his patron. Often, Whitney would “cash in” on a miniature composition, commissioning a large-scale painting based on the little pictures he previewed.
In the nineteenth century, miniature paintings’ association with preparatory sketches, illustration, women makers, and amateur artists such as Edward Ruggles subordinated the form to full-scale oil painting. But today, by approaching these beautiful little pictures on their own terms, we can understand how small-format landscapes could distill and condense vast vistas into something graspable and manageable. In the process of condensing, abridging, and miniaturizing, the small-scale landscape also crystalizes a surprising amount of power, rendering an object that entices viewers to move close and be transported into distant worlds.
This article is published in conjunction with the exhibition This Drop of Earth: American Landscape Miniatures, 1840–1890, on view at the Redwood Library and Athenaeum in Newport, Rhode Island, until January 5, 2025.
1 New York Saturday Press, February 10, 1866, p. 89. 2 “Death of Dr. Ruggles,” New York Times, March 12, 1867, p. 5. 3 “Fine Arts. Sale of ‘Ruggles Gems,’” New York Times, December 20, 1868, p. 5. 4 “The ‘Ruggles Gems,’” ibid., December 15, 1867, p. 5. 5 “Prang’s American Chromo,” Prang’s Chromo: A Journal of Popular Art, vol. 1, no. 2 (April 1868), p. 4. 6 Courtney Leigh Harris, Tiny Treasures: The Magic of Miniatures (Boston: MFA Publications, 2023), p. 77. 7 Susan Stewart, On Longing: Narratives of the Miniature, the Gigantic, the Souvenir, the Collection (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1993), p. 55. 8 Michael F. and Julie E. Meyer, Robert S. Duncanson and His Courageous Southern Travels (Fredericksburg, VA: Meyer Fine Art, 2023), p. 53. 9 Kimia R. Shahi, “William Trost Richards’s ‘Real Drawing’ and the Currency of Watercolor, ca. 1875–85,” American Art, vol. 34, no. 2 (June 2020), p. 60.
CAROLINE CULP is Warren Family Assistant Curator at the American Folk Art Museum in New York City (position begins in September), and guest curator of the Redwood Library and Athenaeum’s This Drop of Earth.
