A cabinet painting is a small painting

Painting

Painting is the practice of applying paint, pigment, color or other medium to a surface . The application of the medium is commonly applied to the base with a brush but other objects can be used. In art, the term painting describes both the act and the result of the action. However, painting is...

, typically no larger than about two feet in either dimension, but often much smaller. The term is especially used of paintings that show full-length figures at a small scale, as opposed to say a head painted nearly life-size, and that are painted very precisely, with a great degree of "finish". From the fifteenth century onwards wealthy collectors of art would keep such paintings in a cabinet

Cabinet (room)

A cabinet was one of a number of terms for a private room in the domestic architecture and that of palaces of early modern Europe, a room serving as a study or retreat, usually for a man. The cabinet would be furnished with books and works of art, and sited adjacent to his bedchamber, the...

, a relatively small and private room (often very small indeed, even in a very large house), to which only those with whom they were on especially intimate terms would be admitted.

This room might be used as a study or office, or just a sitting room. Heating the main rooms in large palaces or mansions in the winter was difficult, and small rooms were more comfortable. They also offered more privacy from servants or other household members or visitors. Typically, such a room would be for the use of a single individual, so that a house might have at least two (his and hers) and often more. Names varied: cabinet, closet, study (from the Italian studiolo), office and others.

Later such paintings might be housed in a display case, which might also be called a cabinet

Cabinet (furniture)

A cabinet is usually a box-shaped piece of furniture with doors or drawers for storing miscellaneous items. Some cabinets stand alone while others are built into a wall or are attached to it like a medicine cabinet. Cabinets are typically made of wood or, now increasingly, of synthetic...

, but the term cabinet arose from the name (originally in Italian) of the room, not the piece of furniture. Other small precious objects, including miniature

Miniature (illuminated manuscript)

The word miniature, derived from the Latin minium, red lead, is a picture in an ancient or medieval illuminated manuscript; the simple decoration of the early codices having been miniated or delineated with that pigment...

 paintings, "curiosities" of all sorts (see cabinet of curiosities

Cabinet of curiosities

A cabinet of curiosities was an encyclopedic collection in Renaissance Europe of types of objects whose categorical boundaries were yet to be defined. They were also known by various names such as Cabinet of Wonder, and in German Kunstkammer or Wunderkammer...

), old master print

Old master print

An old master print is a work of art produced by a printing process within the Western tradition . A date of about 1830 is usually taken as marking the end of the period whose prints are covered by this term. The main techniques concerned are woodcut, engraving and etching, although there are...

s, books, small sculptures and so on, might also be in the room.

There is a rare surviving cabinet with its contents probably little changed since the early eighteenth century at Ham House in Richmond, London. It is less than ten feet square, and leads off from the Long Gallery, which is well over a hundred feet long by about twenty wide, giving a rather startling change in scale and atmosphere. As is often the case, it has an excellent view of the front entrance to the house, so that comings and going can be observed. Most surviving large houses or palaces, especially from before 1700, have such rooms, but they are very often not displayed to visitors.

The magnificent Mannerist Studiolo of Francesco I

Studiolo of Francesco I

The Studiolo was a small painting-encrusted barrel-vaulted room in the Palazzo Vecchio, Florence, commissioned by Francesco I de' Medici, Grand Duke of Tuscany. It was completed for the duke from 1570-1572, by teams of artists under the supervision of Giorgio Vasari and the scholars Giovanni...

 Medici in Florence

Florence

Florence is the capital city of the Italian region of Tuscany and of the province of Florence. It is the most populous city in Tuscany, with approximately 370,000 inhabitants, expanding to over 1.5 million in the metropolitan area....

 is rather larger than most examples, and rather atypical in that most of the paintings were commissioned for the room.

There was an equivalent type of small sculpture, usually bronze

Bronze

Bronze is a metal alloy consisting primarily of copper, usually with tin as the main additive. It is hard and brittle, and it was particularly significant in antiquity, so much so that the Bronze Age was named after the metal...

s, of which the leading exponent in the late Renaissance was Giambologna

Giambologna

Giambologna, born as Jean Boulogne, incorrectly known as Giovanni da Bologna and Giovanni Bologna , was a sculptor, known for his marble and bronze statuary in a late Renaissance or Mannerist style.- Biography :...

 who produced sizeable editions of reduced versions of his large works, and also made many only in small scale. These were designed to be picked up and handled, even fondled. Small antiquities

Antiquities

Antiquities, nearly always used in the plural in this sense, is a term for objects from Antiquity, especially the civilizations of the Mediterranean: the Classical antiquity of Greece and Rome, Ancient Egypt and the other Ancient Near Eastern cultures...

 were also very commonly displayed in such rooms, including coins.

Small paintings have been produced at all periods of Western art, but some periods and artists are especially noticeable for them. Raphael

Raphael

Raffaello Sanzio da Urbino , better known simply as Raphael, was an Italian painter and architect of the High Renaissance. His work is admired for its clarity of form and ease of composition and for its visual achievement of the Neoplatonic ideal of human grandeur...

 produced many cabinet paintings, and all the paintings of the important German artist Adam Elsheimer

Adam Elsheimer

Adam Elsheimer was a German artist working in Rome who died at only thirty-two, but was very influential in the early 17th century. His relatively few paintings were small scale, nearly all painted on copper plates, of the type often known as cabinet paintings. They include a variety of light...

 (1578–1610) could be so described. The works of these two were much copied. The Dutch artists of the seventeenth century had an enormous output of small paintings. The painters of the Leiden School were especially noted "Fijnschilder

Fijnschilder

The Fijnschilders , also called the Leiden Fijnschilders , were Dutch Golden Age painters who, from about 1630 to 1710, strove to create as natural a reproduction of reality as possible in their meticulously executed, often small-scale works.Although in the seventeenth century, as in modern Dutch,...

s" – "fine painters" producing highly finished small works. Watteau, Fragonard

Jean-Honoré Fragonard

Jean-Honoré Fragonard was a French painter and printmaker whose late Rococo manner was distinguished by remarkable facility, exuberance, and hedonism. One of the most prolific artists active in the last decades of the Ancien Régime, Fragonard produced more than 550 paintings , of which only five...

 and other French 18th-century artists produced many small works, generally emphasizing spirit and atmosphere rather than a detailed finish. The term is not as common as it was in the 19th century, but remains in use among art historians.

A "cabinet miniature" is a larger portrait miniature

Portrait miniature

A portrait miniature is a miniature portrait painting, usually executed in gouache, watercolour, or enamel.Portrait miniatures began to flourish in 16th century Europe and the art was practiced during the 17th century and 18th century...

, usually full-length and typically up to about ten inches high. These were first painted in England, from the end of the 1580s, initially by Nicholas Hilliard

Nicholas Hilliard

Nicholas Hilliard was an English goldsmith and limner best known for his portrait miniatures of members of the courts of Elizabeth I and James I of England. He mostly painted small oval miniatures, but also some larger cabinet miniatures, up to about ten inches tall, and at least two famous...

 and Isaac Oliver

Isaac Oliver

Isaac Oliver was a French-born English portrait miniature painter.-Life and work:Born in Rouen, he moved to London in 1568 with his Huguenot parents Peter and Epiphany Oliver to escape the Wars of Religion in France...

.

In 1991, an exhibition 'Cabinet Painting' toured London, Hove Museum and Art Gallery

Hove Museum and Art Gallery

Hove Museum and Art Gallery is a municipally-owned museum in the town of Hove, which is part of the larger city of Brighton and Hove in the South East of England. The museum is part of "Royal Pavilion & Museums, Brighton and Hove", and admission is free...

 and Glynn Vivian Art Gallery and Museum

Glynn Vivian Art Gallery

The Glynn Vivian Art Gallery is the public art gallery of the city of Swansea, Wales. The gallery is situated in Alexandra Road, near Swansea railway station, opposite the old Swansea Central Library and near Swansea Central police station...

, Swansea. It including more than sixty cabinet paintings by contemporary artists.