10 - Henry Tanworth Wells: Miniaturist and Portrait Painter of Distinction

Summary

FROM THE BEGINNING OF his artistic career, Henry Tanworth Wells was a successful painter who produced commissions in both miniature and chalk. Leo R. Schidlof, an expert in miniature painting, deemed him to be ‘a very good miniaturist’. Miniatures originated as a discrete art form in Britain and France in the sixteenth century, and were derived from techniques employed in illuminated manuscripts in the preceding centuries. Miniature painting was regarded as a gentleman's art. In the nineteenth century, many women became amateurs, but in professional circles it remained a male dominated field. By the eighteenth century, portrait miniatures were popular across Europe as, in the pre-photographic period, they provided portable likenesses that were, by virtue of their scale, personal objects. It was a highly popular mid-nineteenth-century genre. Portrait miniatures were Wells's mainstay, although he also produced subject paintings in miniature. Only a handful of his miniatures survive today, a common problem with miniaturists of this period, and there is very little in the letters and diaries that form part of The Boyce Papers about his artistic practices in this field, even though it was the primary focus of his work throughout the period of the documents.

Wells began his professional career as a portrait miniaturist, having learned the techniques while apprenticed from the age of fourteen to the publisher, print-seller and photographic agent Joseph Dickinson (1780– 1849) who had a fine art business at 114 New Bond Street, London. His initial training was as a lithographic draughtsman, and while it is unclear what precipitated the transition to miniature painting, it is evident that the young Wells had a natural aptitude for this exigent practice. Between 1848 and 1860, Wells exhibited upwards of seventy works at The Royal Academy, the majority portrait miniatures. The Boyce Papers make it clear that this figure was a fraction of Wells's output in the medium. Indeed, if his productivity accorded with that of fellow miniaturist Sir Charles William Ross, then the leading exponent of miniature painting, it is possible that Wells could have painted in the region of fifty miniatures a year.