For three centuries, painters like Nicholas Hilliard at the Tudor court made tiny portraits in watercolor on vellum or ivory — carried in lockets, exchanged in courtships, sent with marriage negotiations. The daguerreotype of 1839 did the same job faster, cheaper and with a machine's authority; within two decades the trade had collapsed, and many miniaturists survived by becoming photographers or hand-tinting other people's photographs.
Portrait miniaturist no longer exists as a living trade. Here is what erased it, and which profession took on the work.
1400 – 1839
Oil paint, academies and the old masters
Van Eyck's perfected oil glazes gave Europe a medium of unprecedented depth, and the Renaissance gave painters a new self-image: Titian was ennobled by Emperor Charles V in 1533, and the legend that the emperor stooped to pick up the painter's dropped brush became the trade's favorite status parable. Academies in Florence, Paris and London gradually pried painting out of the guilds, while the Salon system turned exhibition into a career's gate — and left a generation of rejected painters ready to revolt.
What else was happening then
1563
Florence founds the first art academy
At Giorgio Vasari's urging, Cosimo I de' Medici charters the Accademia delle Arti del Disegno in Florence, with the elderly Michelangelo honored as its symbolic head. For the first time painters have an institution that classes them with scholars rather than with the craft guilds — the opening move in a status campaign that would take centuries to win across Europe.
1648
Paris builds the academy-salon machine
The Académie royale de peinture et de sculpture is founded in Paris, with Charles Le Brun among its leaders, and from 1667 runs the Salon — the state exhibition that decided which painters existed in the public eye. For two centuries the academy's hierarchy of genres, with history painting at the top, defined what ambition in painting meant.
1841
Rand patents the paint tube
American portrait painter John Goffe Rand patents the collapsible metal paint tube, replacing pig bladders and glass syringes. Ready paint that traveled made painting outdoors practical, and the Impressionists knew what they owed it: Renoir told his son that without colors in tubes there would have been no Cézanne, no Monet, no Pissarro — nothing the journalists would call Impressionism.
1874
The first Impressionist exhibition
Shut out or fed up with the Salon, thirty artists including Monet, Renoir, Degas and Berthe Morisot mount their own exhibition in the former Paris studio of the photographer Nadar. Critic Louis Leroy mocks Monet's "Impression, Sunrise" in Le Charivari under the title "Exhibition of the Impressionists" — and the insult becomes the name of the movement that broke the academy's monopoly.
Where that work lives now
The oldest image-making trade on record — from 45,000-year-old cave walls to the contemporary studio, still practiced one brushstroke at a time.
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