This stimulating catalogue, published to accompany the recent exhibition of the same name at the Scottish National Portrait Gallery and the British Museum, serves as a valuable introduction to the little-studied genre of portraits on paper. Remarkably, The Intimate Portrait was the first major exhibition in Britain to focus exclusively on this branch of artistic practice and, in their introductory essays, Fellows Stephen Lloyd and Kim Sloan make a strong case for the important role portrait miniatures, pastels, watercolours and drawings played in eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century fashionable life. Though hundreds of such works were exhibited at the Royal Academy every year, they were often the focus of critical censure by the contemporary art world’s great and good and remain the subject of continued neglect in a field characterized by an overwhelming focus on oil painting at the expense of all other media.

While the light-sensitive nature of many of these objects, which prohibits their permanent display, has undoubtedly militated against any bid for attention, the sheer volume of small-scale portrait drawings produced in Britain during the period under consideration may also have much to do with the low esteem in which they were (and to some extent continue to be) held. Yet their very ubiquity suggests that, as a means of artistic expression, they accorded incomparably well with the particular conduct of eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century life: its unprecedented patterns of consumption, the new desire for privacy emerging in social and cultural discourse, the growing sentimentalization of familial and domestic life, and the characteristic contemporary delight in all things titillating and licentious. Kim Sloan justly describes the ‘Pandora’s box that is the discourse surrounding portrait drawings’ in Britain from about 1740 to 1840 and proposes that these works had a uniquely liminal status, arguably both the source of their significance and the reason for their disregard; ‘when the medium is drawing on paper, the boundaries of artist, collector, sitter, friend and patron, business and pleasure, public and private are all rather blurred’.

Both Sloan and Lloyd give due attention to the formal qualities of the various works included in the catalogue and their function in the field of portraiture. Equal status is accorded to both their iconographic and physical properties and admirable attempts are made to reconstruct their contemporary use and display. Lloyd discusses Horace Walpole’s extraordinary cabinet of miniatures at his residence Strawberry Hill and writes perceptively about the miniaturist Richard Cosway, a peddler of intimacy in all its guises, from erotic images for gentlemen’s snuff boxes to fashionable eye and mouth miniatures exchanged as lovers’ tokens. Lloyd elucidates how miniatures functioned as complex objects of affection and memory, assuaging absence and affirming love, bearing witness to the most essential of human activities. Sloan, in turn, draws attention to the contemporary craze for producing series of portrait drawings. She emphasizes how the execution of such schemes was an art of leisure; quite separate from the business of painting portraits, or drawing them on commission. Sloan’s focus on these series also allows for an examination of the interrelation and cross-fertilization between drawing and different media – in this instance, the production of printed reproductions for circulation.

The catalogue itself, subdivided into thematic sections, is notable for its superb illustrations; all the more necessary with works of such fineness and detail. Miniature painting is represented by a broad range of examples, from the earliest known works signed by Thomas Lawrence – a pair of portrait drawings in profile of Mr and Mrs Grier, dating from c 1779–80 – to the sorrowful intensity of Charlotte Jones’s The Eye of Princess Charlotte, c 1817, commissioned by her husband, Prince Leopold of Saxe-Coburg-Saalfeld, after she died in childbirth. Pastel-painting is equally well represented, with the blowsy atmospherics of John Russell’s work in fascinating contrast with the pin-sharp, unforgiving precision of Archibald Skirving’s work. That ultimate exercise in intimate vision – the self-portrait – is also comprehensively explored. Consummate self-promoters, such as Joshua Reynolds and Richard Cosway, demonstrate their talent for self-fashioning, while more introspective and meditative possibilities are suggested by Allan Ramsay’s melancholy gaze of c 1755, Zoffany’s powerful self-portrait of c 1775 and the brooding, shadowy image of Richard Parkes Bonington, executed by the artist c 1825–6.

A selection of portraits of artists’ families and friends display a variety and intimacy of approach not found in portraits in oils. William Hoare’s affectionate depiction of the enamel painter Christian Friedrich Zincke, working with open-mouthed concentration in his studio in 1752, was made as a gift to the sitter, inspired by Hoare’s ‘Love and Friendship’ for him, and serves as both a testimonial to their relationship and a fascinating document of an artist at work. David Wilkie’s tour de force, A Greenwich Pensioner in the Character of Commodore Trunnion (1823), included as part of an examination of the spread of portrait drawing en masse, demonstrates the genre at its best, with its display of spontaneous confident line and communication of a forceful sense of personality. Equally, Ozias Humphrey’s 1776 portrait Prince Charles Edward Stuart, used to illustrate the connection between portrait drawing and celebrity, is a marvellously evocative image of disappointment and dissipation, in striking contrast to the confident bright young man of Maurice Quentin de La Tour’s pastel of the same sitter in 1748.

This selection of masterful works only scrapes the surface of the rich treasures The Intimate Portrait catalogue has to offer. As the preface makes clear, the publication is designed to encourage further discourse on eighteenth- and nineteenth-century small-scale, domestic portraiture and much work has yet to be done. Both the catalogue and the exhibition are a significant step in the right direction; of inestimable value for the considered way in which they open up a neglected area of artistic practice to a wider audience.