Cabinet painting
Photograph by candescenton Flickr.
Other small precious objects, including miniature paintings, curiosities The Art of Painting Vermeer of all sorts (see cabinet of curiosities), old master prints, books, small sculptures and so on, might also be in the room. There Cabinet painting is a rare surviving cabinet with its contents probably little changed since the early eighteenth century at Ham House, Richmond outside London. The painters of the Leiden School were especially noted fijnschilders - that is fine painters producing highly finished small works.
Watteau, Fragonard Cabinet painting and other French 18th century artists produced many small works, generally emphasizing spirit and atmosphere rather than a detailed finish. Most surviving large houses or palaces, especially from before 1700, have such rooms, but they are very often not displayed to visitors. The magnificent Mannerist Studiolo of Francesco I Medici in Cabinet painting Florence is rather larger than most examples, and rather atypical in that most of the paintings were commissioned for the room. There was an equivalent type of small sculpture, usually bronzes, of which the leading exponent in the late Renaissance was Giambologna who produced sizeable editions of reduced versions of his Cabinet painting large works, and also made many only in small-scale.
It including more than sixty cabinet paintings by contemporary artists. . The term is not as common as it was in the 19th century, but remains in use among art historians. A cabinet miniature is a larger portrait miniature, usually full-length and typically up to about ten inches high.
They also offered more privacy from servants or other household members or visitors. Heating the main rooms in large palaces or mansions in the winter was difficult, and small rooms were more comfortable.
Small antiquities were also very commonly displayed in such rooms, including coins. Small paintings have been produced at all periods of Western art, but some periods and artists are especially noticeable for them. Raphael produced many cabinet paintings, and all the paintings of the important German artist Adam Elsheimer (1578-1610) could be so described.
The Dutch artists of the seventeenth century had an enormous output of small paintings. These were designed to be picked up and handled, even fondled.
From the fifteenth century onwards wealthy collectors of art would keep such paintings in a cabinet, a relatively small and private room (often very small indeed, even in a very large house), to which only those with whom they were on especially intimate terms would be admitted. This room might be used as a study or office, or just a sitting room. The works of these two were much copied.
A cabinet painting (or cabinet picture ) is a small painting, typically no larger than about two feet in either dimension, but often much smaller. It is less than ten feet square, and leads off from the Long Gallery, which is well over a hundred feet long by about twenty wide, giving a rather startling change in scale and atmosphere.
Typically, such a room would be for the use of a single individual, so that a house might have at least two (his and hers) and often more. Names varied: cabinet, closet, study (from the Italian studiolo), office and others. Later such paintings might be housed in a display case, which might also be called a cabinet, but the term cabinet arose from the name (originally in Italian) of the room, not the piece of furniture.
