Director’s Foreword

Reynolds, Jock

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Director’s Foreword

Jock Reynolds

Love and Loss: American Portrait and Mourning Miniatures

~We are pleased to present Love and Loss: American Portrait and Mourning Miniatures, the first book and exhibition to fully explore the strong ties between the history of the miniature and American private life. Miniatures have long been recognized as commemorating highly personal, frequently hidden associations between sitter and beholder. These tokens of...

Author

Jock Reynolds

PublisherYale University Art Gallery

PublisherYale University Press

Related print edition pages: pp.VII-VIII

https://doi.org/10.37862/aaeportal.00078.002

Stable URL: https://aaeportal.com/?id=-19048

Director’s Foreword

We are pleased to present Love and Loss: American Portrait and Mourning Miniatures, the first book and exhibition to fully explore the strong ties between the history of the miniature and American private life. Miniatures have long been recognized as commemorating highly personal, frequently hidden associations between sitter and beholder. These tokens of love and loss have found their interpreter in Robin Jaffee Frank, associate curator of American Paintings and Sculpture, who organized the exhibition and wrote the catalogue. We owe special thanks to her for pursuing myriad threads of inquiry in an effort to restore to these objects the ties of family and friends that brought them into being. I would also like to express my gratitude to Helen A. Cooper, The Holcombe T. Green Curator of American Paintings and Sculpture, for her unwavering support of this project. In the acknowledgments, Robin Frank thanks the many colleagues, including the Yale graduate student fellows, who have been instrumental in the realization of this exhibition and publication. I can only underscore our appreciation for their important contributions.

We are proud to share Love and Loss: American Portrait and Mourning Miniatures with the Gibbes Museum of Art, Charleston, South Carolina, and the Addison Gallery of American Art, Phillips Academy, Andover, Massachusetts. For being such enthusiastic partners, our thanks to the staffs of both institutions, and especially directors Paul Figueroa and Adam Weinberg, and curators Angela Mack and Susan Faxon, respectively.

Above all, we are indebted to Davida Tenenbaum Deutsch and Alvin Deutsch, Esq., LL.B. 1958, whose timely promised bequest to Yale of their distinguished collection of American miniatures significantly enriches this exhibition and publication. Most important to a university museum, by enhancing existing strengths and filling gaps, their bequest makes it possible to teach the history of the American miniature comprehensively by using the finest examples. This exhibition and publication makes the Yale collection, considered among the finest in the world, accessible for the first time.

But the story of the American miniature would be incomplete without the addition of critical loans of several superb miniatures, important paintings of people making or wearing miniatures, and artists’ tools that elucidate the creative process. We are profoundly grateful to our lenders, who have deprived themselves of treasured objects so that we can illuminate the little-understood but rich role that the miniature has played in art and social history.

This project has received crucial and generous funding from The Henry Luce Foundation, Inc., and was supported in part by a grant from the National Endowment for the Arts, a Federal agency. Additional support was provided by the Virginia and Leonard Marx Publication Fund. We are greatly indebted to the Getty Grant Program for supporting conservation treatment of the miniatures. We also thank Allen Wardwell, B.A. 1957, who shortly before his untimely death directed a bequest from his mother’s estate in support of the American miniatures project.

Jock Reynolds
The Henry J. Heinz II Director
Yale University Art Gallery

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