CLEVELAND, OH.- The Cleveland Museum of Art announces its pilot project in digital publishing, British Portrait Miniatures from the Cleveland Museum of Art. This catalogue showcases a substantial portion of the museum’s internationally known collection of around 170 portrait miniatures, one of the most significant in the country. The first stage of this searchable online catalogue includes 54 British portrait miniatures from the 17th, 18th, and 19th centuries, with publication of the remaining British works ongoing though out the year. The catalogue presents new research on the individual miniatures, explores the museum’s collection holistically and incorporates comparative images of works from other public and private collections. The miniatures catalogued online can be viewed at actual size, from the front and the back, and in unprecedented detail. Authored by Cory Korkow, PhD, a Paintings and Drawings Society curatorial fellow whose initial research was funded by grants from the Samuel H. Kress Foundation, the catalogue includes new research about the artists, sitters, and successive owners of these miniatures, while incorporating conservation photographs and allowing the collection be studied in great detail for the first time.
“This innovative project illustrates not only our deep commitment to original scholarly research on our collection, but our creativity in the presentation and dissemination of that knowledge,” said David Franklin, the Sarah S. and Alexander M. Cutler director.
To access the British Portrait Miniatures catalogue, please go
here
The Cleveland Museum of Art’s Portrait Miniature Collection
Between 1916 and 1926, the museum received around two-dozen miniatures from the Wade collection, which formed the seed of the museum’s holdings. Edward B. Greene (1878–1957), Jeptha Homer Wade’s son-in-law, gave his distinguished European portrait miniatures collection to the museum in the 1940s, establishing it as one of the finest in the country. In addition, Greene sponsored the acquisition of several important miniatures during the early 1950s, most notably John Smart’s Self-portrait (1802) and Richard Cosway’s Portrait of Louis-Philippe, Duke of Orléans, later King of the French. Eight portraits were recently given in 2010 to the museum by bequest of Muriel Butkin (1915–2008) and the museum’s commitment to building this part of the collection has also been evidenced by recent acquisitions by Anna Maria Carew, Joseph Daniel, the Artist “V”, John Linnell and Isaac Oliver.
The scope of this collection includes more than ten nationalities, spans the sixteenth to the twentieth century and bridges five curatorial departments. Although the collection contains works from each century and nation represented, it is particularly strong in British and French specimens. The miniatures are mounted in a wide variety of settings including boxes, lockets, standing frames, rings and bracelets. Sizes range from nearly ten inches in height to less than one inch. The collection also includes graphite preparatory studies on paper as well as cabinet miniatures featuring religious or historical scenes, and photography-related miniatures set in Fabergé objets d’art. The portrait miniature collection will be the subject of a special exhibition to take place in the fall of 2013 at the Cleveland Museum of Art.
Cory Korkow
Cory Korkow has held the position of Curatorial Fellow of European Art at the Cleveland Museum of Art from 2008 - 2011. In 2012 she was appointed the inaugural Painting and Drawing Society Fellow, a position supported by the museum’s affiliate group of the same name. In both appointments, Korkow has focused on the cataloguing, physical display, conservation review, and digital presentation of the museum’s collection of British, Continental and American portrait miniatures. She has been instrumental in researching and pursuing new acquisitions, including John Linnell’s Portrait of Anne Law (née Towry), 1st Lady Ellenborough which came into the collection in 2010.
Before her time at the Cleveland Museum of Art, Korkow worked as a research assistant and digital imagist at the Dante Gabriel Rossetti Archive, a digital hypermedia archive of the complete works of the artist, sponsored by the University of Virginia’s Institute for Advanced Technology in the Humanities. While at the University of Virginia, Korkow taught art history seminars, with topics courses focusing in 18th and 19th century European art. She has interned at the Joslyn Art Museum in Omaha, NE, the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C., and the Peggy Guggenheim Collection in Venice, Italy.
Korkow specializes in Victorian painting and received her PhD in the History of Art from the University of Virginia in 2008.
