Portrait Miniatures

A category that has long attracted curiosity and intrigue, Portrait Miniatures first emerged in the 15th century, serving as political gifts and tokens of love. In 1830, King George IV was buried wearing a miniature of his secret and illegal wife, Maria Fitzherbert, and, in 2017, Maria's corresponding portrait of the king as a young man in armour sold at Christie's for £341,000.

Christie's has a strong history of selling Portrait Miniatures, from the 1935 collection of American banker John Pierpont Morgan to the 2013 sale of the late Mrs T.S. Eliot’s collection, which featured a miniature by novelist and poet Charlotte Brontë. In 2018, we set multiple records with the portrait miniatures from the collection of the late Swiss collector, Ernst Holzscheiter.

Our auctions showcase Portrait Miniatures by leading European artists from Elizabethan Britain, the Bourbon dynasty, the Romanov empire and the Napoleonic period, including Nicholas Hilliard, Isaac Oliver, Jean-Baptiste Jacques Augustin, Jean-Etienne Liotard, Augustin Christian Ritt and many others who have captured the iconography of history’s protagonists.