Queen Mary
In the summer of 1922, Edmund and Sybil Turrell Kirby of James Street, Syracuse, rented the Clarence Mason Austin home for the season. Accompanying Sybil was her father, Charles Turrell, one of the foremost artists of miniatures of his day. Beginning on July 25th, he hosted a week-long exhibition of his “portraits on ivory” upstairs at the Skaneateles Library. Among the miniatures on display were portraits of Queen Mary, Princess Alexandra and Princess Mary.
Princess Alexandra
Princess Mary
Born in London, Charles James Turrell (1845-1932) took up the painting of miniatures at the age of 19. In 1867, he visited New York City where he painted miniatures for two years at the studio of photographer Napoleon Sarony. He returned to England, and from 1881 onward he kept a studio on Bond Street where he painted a succession of “distinguished sitters.” Married to an American, he spent his winters in the U.S. at a home in White Plains because he felt the light was better than in London.
Col. George Gosling
Minna O’Conor
Six of Turrell’s portraits of British Royals are in the collection of the Queen of England. In the U.S., he numbered the Vanderbilts and J. Pierpont Morgan among his clients.
Lady Alice Montagu
Dudley Heath, in Miniatures (1905) noted, “It is refreshing amongst this sea of mediocrity to refer to the work of Charles Turrell, who is still exercising his art. Perhaps the younger generation of miniaturists in the last century owed more to Turrell’s work than to any other more remote influence.”
Robert Glynn Lewis
A collection of his work – Miniatures: A Series of Reproductions in Colour and Photogravure of Ninety-eight Miniatures of Distinguished Personages (1913) – is a rarity but copies are still available, for $950 and up.
Skaneateles 