Bosom buddies

OF THE 2m objects in the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, one of the most startling is the painting with accession number 2006.235.74. Summoned from the stacks where it lives most of the time, the tiny picture sits on a block of comforting polystyrene, a blue surgical glove on either side acting as a guard of honour. The idealised breasts that are the painting’s centrepiece are even more luminous in the original than in reproductions. Swathed in a furry gauze, they present themselves like a jewel in a box or a bonbon, something secret and sweet, both a revelation and a challenge.

The picture comes not from Britain, where miniature-painting became especially popular in the 18th century, nor even from France, the home of sensuality. It was painted in puritanical Boston in 1828. If that is not surprise enough, more surprising still is the painting’s atmosphere of vulnerable humanity: the left breast rounder and slightly more settled than the right, the nipples ever so lightly puckered, the skin salted with goosebumps. Shown here nearly three times its actual size, “Beauty Revealed: Self Portrait” was painted from life by a right-handed woman in a studio that was none too warm.