Quartermaine Hall

Artisan: Leslie Smith
Date: 2021
Inscriptions: signed and dated ‘Leslie Smith 2021’ and inscribed ‘ “Flowers in a Vase” after Ambrosius Bosschaert (1573-1621)’ (on the back)
Dimensions: 65 x 54 x 3 mm. / 2 ½ x 2 ⅛ x ⅛ inches (height x width x depth, including frame)
Intended Room: Drawing Room
Inventory number: 2022.153
Category: Pictures

Provenance: Purchased directly from the artist at Kensington Dolls House Festival, May 2022

One annoying thing about being an art historian is that you end up with very expensive taste. Since we can’t buy full size pictures for our home – having neither the income nor the space – I was thrilled to learn that some talented miniaturists paint dolls’-house-sized copies of artworks. Having done some research, I decided that Leslie Smith was one of the top artists in the field, and to my delight he turned out to have a stand at the Kensington Dolls House Festival in May 2022. I made a beeline and, reader, his paintings were just as marvellous in reality as they’d looked on his website. He gets all the detail just right, and he has extraordinary command over his miniscule brush strokes.

There I stood, poring over the variety on offer, which ranged from small flower pictures to a superb grand full-length portrait after William Larkin. Eventually, I chose this gorgeous little copy after Ambrosius Bosschaert. Our Drawing Room, which is going to be blue-and-white themed, will have the Dutch and Chinese porcelain set off with some still lives. We already have some prints, crafted by Mariangela Gagliardi to look like paintings, but how much more wonderful to have an original picture! As I was photographing the painting for this catalogue, my macro lens enabled me to examine it at a degree of magnification that revealed the spontaneous tiny brushstrokes which somehow, miraculously, come together to create this lovely polished painting.

Hopefully it will be only the first of my collection of Leslie’s works…