Continental Hand Painted Porcelain Miniature Portrait in Ornate Hanging Frame. Signed "J.M." bottom right edge. The ormolu oval frame has numerous curling shapes throughout it. 

Size: 3 3/4 x 4 3/4 in. 

French miniature painting, usually done on porcelain, bone, paper, or board, reached its zenith in the 18th Century and was popular far into the 19th as well. Miniatures by François Dumont, Nicolas de Largillière, François Boucher, Jean-Marc Nattier, and Jean-Germain Drouais dominated the field, but the greatest names active in France throughout the period were outsiders: Peter Adolf Hall of Sweden and Friedrich Heinrich Füger of Austria, whose style heavily influenced all the others. The tiny pictures painted by the Blarenberghe family are by many persons grouped as miniatures, and some of the later French artists, such as Pierre-Paul Prud’hon and Constance Mayer, executed a handful of miniature portraits to demonstrate their skill, though it was not their primary focus. The most popular miniature artists in France in the 19th Century were Jean-Baptiste Jacques Augustin and Jean-Baptiste Isabey, whose portraits of Napoleon, Josephine, and their court are considered exceedingly fine and prized, with hundreds of artists shifting to these subjects to imitate them. 

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