What do we know?

These two “paintings in little,” carried out in oil on copper, are in the collection of the Rosenbach Museum & Library in Philadelphia, which has the largest holdings in the United States of so-called “miniatures” painted in oil on copper – several hundred of them.

We know from the files kept on the Museum’s collections by the curatorial staff at the Rosenbach Museum & Library that Talbot Hughes, an English collector in the early part of the 20th century, originally accumulated a collection of at least 700 miniatures, most of them oil on copper, and sold them in 1928 to Philip Rosenbach, one of the two Rosenbach brothers after whom the Museum is named. Included in that collection were two portraits that Hughes identified in his own catalogue of the collection as of a sitter known as the “Duchess of Mazarin.” He dated them to the 17th century (1600-1699). He provided no supporting evidence for either the title or the date.

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