OF THE 2m objects in the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, one of the most startling is the painting with accession number 2006.235.74. Summoned from the stacks where it lives most of the time, the tiny picture sits on a block of comforting polystyrene, a blue surgical glove on either side acting as a guard of honour. The idealised breasts that are the painting’s centrepiece are even more luminous in the original than in reproductions. Swathed in a furry gauze, they present themselves like a jewel in a box or a bonbon, something secret and sweet, both a revelation and a challenge.

The picture comes not from Britain, where miniature-painting became especially popular in the 18th century, nor even from France, the home of sensuality. It was painted in puritanical Boston in 1828. If that is not surprise enough, more surprising still is the painting’s atmosphere of vulnerable humanity: the left breast rounder and slightly more settled than the right, the nipples ever so lightly puckered, the skin salted with goosebumps. Shown here nearly three times its actual size, “Beauty Revealed: Self Portrait” was painted from life by a right-handed woman in a studio that was none too warm.

Portrait miniatures were brought to America by European settlers. Sometimes they were the only mementoes of family and friends left behind, never to be seen again. The term miniature derives from minium, the red lead ink used in medieval manuscript illumination, and was originally a reference to technique rather than to size. It is perhaps no coincidence that people started painting them during the scientific revolution when Sir Isaac Newton published “Opticks”, his treatise on the fundamental nature of light, and the world was being seen anew. If easel portraits had long been made for public gaze and approbation, by the mid-1700s, miniatures, newly voguish, were for discreet contemplation, a peephole into the sitter’s private self. Miniatures became a common way for people to mark family milestones: betrothal, marriage, birth, death. They were hidden in drawers, or worn: by women on a chain inside the bodice or, by men, on a pin behind the lapel of a jacket.

Their popularity in the North American colonies in the early 19th century coincided with a growing economy and a shift in social attitudes towards family, marriage, children and love. Men may have been the gunbearers of the revolution, but according to John Adams, America’s second president, the new republic also needed a “national Morality” that could be obtained only by championing family values.

Although independent, the new state still looked to the old world as its cultural true north. The best American artists travelled to London to study with the English masters; British fashions became American fashions. Some things, though, struggled to catch on, especially anything to do with the carnal or erotic. That is what makes “Beauty Revealed” such an unusual work. Americans, for example, did not like painting from models. Until long after the revolution no American academy offered life drawing from naked, live models, as was the tradition in Europe. It was the same with eye portraits, hand-painted miniatures of single human eyes set in jewellery and given as tokens of affection, which became all the rage in Britain after the Prince of Wales secretly proposed to his Catholic mistress, Mrs Fitzherbert, in 1785 with a miniature of his own eye. It would take another 15 years before the first eye portraits were painted in America, and even then the fashion never really took off.

Boston or bust

The earliest American portrait miniatures date from the 1740s, and were painted in oil on wood or copper. Artists travelled from city to city with their tools: a portable work desk, a small box of paints, handmade brushes, reducing glass, pieces of wood or copper, and, increasingly, slices of ivory cut from tusk or whalebone. The exquisite finish of “Beauty Revealed” came from using watercolour on an ivory wafer so thin it is transparent when held up to the light.

Miniatures required a special delicacy of hand and brush; being associated with emotion, they were deemed from the beginning to be particularly suited to women. Sarah Goodrich, the artist who painted “Beauty Revealed”, was born in 1788. She grew up in the Massachusetts countryside and learned to draw, according to her family, by scratching pictures on birch bark using a pin. Eventually she moved to Boston, then the most cultured city in America, and took instruction from Gilbert Stuart, a celebrated portraitist, who, during the American revolution, had exhibited at the Royal Academy in London.

Goodrich learned how to cut ivory shavings into the shape she wanted for a painting and how to make watercolour stick on ivory’s oily surface by heating, greasing and sanding it, and finally treating it with gum arabic. She learned not to flood the pigment with too much water, lest she make the colours run. Stuart, whose daughter was also a painter, commented that Goodrich’s portrait of him was the “only true likeness”; he liked it so much that he made a gift of it to his mother, adorned with a bracelet woven from his and his wife’s hair.

Other painters travelled, touting for work. Goodrich was so well-known that clients came to her

A year after she met him Goodrich opened a small studio of her own and was soon painting two or three miniatures a week, enough to allow her to buy a house in the elegant Beacon Hill district of Boston near the Charles river. There she raised an orphaned niece and cared for her invalid mother for the last 11 years of her mother’s life. Between commissions she painted several likenesses of herself. A self-portrait from 1830 (pictured), now in the collection of the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston, shows her sitting, as tradition demanded, three-quarters on. She has a helmet of dark curled hair and a shawl wrapped decorously around her shoulders. Neither beautiful nor ugly, Goodrich has an open, self-possessed face; her eyebrow is almost arched, her look wry, humorous, forthright.

Goodrich had a wide circle of artist friends in Boston, and would have discussed the paintings that were exhibited there. She may well have had views on John Vanderlyn’s “Ariadne Asleep on the Island of Naxos”, a large painting of a naked woman, breasts akimbo, that was shown in Boston in 1826, two years before Goodrich painted “Beauty Revealed”. Vanderlyn, unusually among American artists, had gone to France to study, rather than to England. His French-style Ariadne, which would become America’s most famous early nude, shocked many both in Boston and New York, and his painting style did not take off. He died in upstate New York a quarter-century later, a pauper. By contrast, the Boston Athenaeum held five exhibitions of Goodrich’s conventional portraits, starting in 1827, and she went on working for nearly 30 years until she could no longer see well enough for the tiny stipples needed to layer colour on ivory.

Enter the patron

Many miniaturists of the time would travel, touting for work. Nathaniel Hancock’s advertisements, which describe him as taking “the most correct Likenesses”, have him travelling from Petersburg, Virginia, to Richmond, Boston, Portsmouth and Exeter, New Hampshire, as well as Salem, Massachusetts, in less than ten years. Goodrich became sufficiently well-known that clients came to her. One of her most dedicated patrons was Daniel Webster, the North’s best-known orator and statesman. A senator and one-time secretary of state, Webster would throw away any chance of becoming president when, in 1850, he supported a political compromise over slavery that infuriated the abolitionists—though it saved the Union and delayed the American civil war by a decade.

Webster: patron, orator and statesman Webster was a drinker. He was also easy with money and not beyond writing to the president of the Bank of the United States, just when the Senate was debating the renewal of the bank’s charter, complaining that his retainer “has not been received or refreshed as usual”. Nevertheless, in 1956, the future president, John F. Kennedy, wrote up Daniel Webster as the second of his Pulitzer prize-winning “Profiles in Courage”, describing him as “one of the most extraordinary figures in American political history”. Goodrich and Webster probably met in 1819, when Goodrich’s teacher and mentor, Gilbert Stuart, was painting Webster’s portrait, and Goodrich was asked to paint a miniature of Webster’s young daughter, Julia. They began a lively correspondence. Her letters to him have disappeared, but 44 of his survive. At first he signs them, “Yrs always truly…” and “Yrs. Always”, and later writes, “I shall not go away without seeing you.” Over the years Goodrich would paint a number of miniatures of Webster’s children, grandchildren and other relatives, and over a dozen portraits of the senator himself. The earliest extant painting dates to 1825 and shows him with vivid eyes and thin, sculpted lips. By 1827, in a miniature that belongs to the Massachusetts Historical Society, he seems more confident, despite a receding hairline; his eyes almost smouldering. In the portrait that was painted in 1828, by contrast, his head appears sunk into his jacket. That was the year Webster’s wife, Grace, died, leaving him with three young children. “I feel very little zeal or spirit in regard to the passing affairs,” he wrote to a friend. “My most strong propensity is to sit down, and sit still.” As for Goodrich, she did two things of note in 1828. She left Massachusetts for the first and only time, travelling to Washington, DC, to see the bereaved senator. And she painted “Beauty Revealed”, a painting like no other in the history of American art.

Webster, in search of a mother for his children, and of money, needed a wife, and soon began thinking again of marriage. By May 1829 he was courting Catherine Van Rensselaer, the daughter of a rich patron in New York who was one of Webster’s political allies. Nothing came of it, and by November he was writing to friends about Caroline Le Roy, the daughter of a reputable New York merchant. At 32, Caroline was not young; neither was she beautiful. But, wrote Webster, he found her “amiable, discreet, prudent, with enough personal comeliness to satisfy me, & of the most excellent character and principles.” She was also, though he didn’t say so, rich. They were married before the end of the year.

Webster’s second marriage did not mean the end of his association with Goodrich. Quite the reverse. The artist and the senator continued to write to one another, and she went on painting him and his grandchildren. She lent him money when he was short, and he amassed considerable debts with her. His last letter, from January 2nd 1851, the year after he lost his Senate seat and not long before he died, confesses: “I send you a check for $215.39—which will leave due, according to yr acct $2000 ($19,000 in today’s money)—For this I will try to arrange pretty soon.”

In 1853, three days after Christmas, Sarah Goodrich had a stroke and died. Daniel Webster had succumbed just over a year earlier. Ill already with cirrhosis of the liver, he suffered a brain haemorrhage after falling from his horse. Among his personal effects, his family found two gifts from Goodrich: one of her paintboxes and “Beauty Revealed: Self-Portrait”, the disembodied ivory miniature. Only someone who had seen that bosom uncovered would recognise, on the inner curve of the right breast, the tiny beauty spot—and know to whom it belonged.