Good things come in small packages: The art of an excellent miniature

Elizabeth Meek couldn’t stop sketching. She worked as a nurse, but spent her spare time drawing her colleagues — until, one day, the urge became too strong and she quit her job to become an artist. Several decades later, she has not only gained an MBE for services to the Arts, but also painted two portraits of The King, the latest of which is a tiny miniature that The Queen wears at state functions.

‘Really, when I look back, to leave nursing and become an artist with no support — I don’t know what I was thinking, but I did it,’ she says. It was a complete leap in the dark for a young woman brought up in the non-conformist community of the Plymouth Brethren in Devon. Entirely self-taught, she knew nothing about the art world: ‘I was quite naive about what happened out there.’ However, her passion and talent carried her through: ‘I did it my way and I did rather well at it, which was a bit of a surprise, because that wasn’t what I anticipated. I didn’t really know where I was going with it.’

The first two pictures she made were for a children’s hospital, then she started doing small pencil portraits on commission and went from there: ‘I think my biggest ambition was to get into the Royal Academy, but I achieved that quite quickly.’

A chance discovery in a bookshop set her life on a new course: ‘I found a book on miniatures and thought: “I like the look of these things.”’ She finds painting on a compact scale rather therapeutic. ‘You become particularly focused — a bit like mindfulness, I suppose: quite stressful, but mindful nevertheless.’ She also relishes the fact that she is closely following in the footsteps of generations of miniaturists all the way back to Nicholas Hilliard and Tudor England. Granted, her youngest sitters may be ‘wearing a Mickey Mouse T-shirt, as opposed to a ruffs and lots of jewels’, the medium she uses is different — polymer instead of ivory or vellum — and she prefers oils to watercolour, but, she maintains: ‘I don’t think a lot has changed in the way we paint miniatures.’

Soon after taking up limning, Elizabeth started exhibiting with the Royal Society of Miniature Painters, Sculptors & Gravers and — after numerous shows, many awards and a spell at the helm of the Society of Women Artists — she became its president. The society’s patron was the same at the time as it is now, although his title has since changed: The King, then the Prince of Wales. When he saw Elizabeth’s work, he commissioned a portrait of himself for his private collection. He sat for her at Highgrove and ‘"gave [the picture] to his darling wife," that’s the way he put it’. Elizabeth delivered it to Clarence House and recalls being on tenterhooks as she followed an equerry along a corridor. She needn’t have worried: ‘I went in and Prince Charles (as was) said: “Would you like a cup of tea?” And I thought: “Oh, he likes it. He’s fine. It’s okay.”’

That was 2005. Then, last year, an art dealer asked whether she could share Elizabeth's contact details with someone who was trying to get hold of her in confidence. It was a Palace aide. ‘They asked if I would consider doing a teeny-weeny portrait, much smaller than I’d ever done before. Given I am now 72, I was a bit daunted. I said: “I don’t know how this is going to go, but if you want me to do it…” He, The King, wanted me to do it, apparently.’

Elizabeth has faced the odd hurdle in her career — one, in particular: ‘I was painting a baby, which was really quite difficult and as I was cutting the [portrait into an] oval, after weeks of working on this thing, I snipped part of the miniature off.’ Not even that, however, came close to the challenge of this commission. The ‘very courteous and thoughtful’ Palace aides arranged for her to see past examples of royal miniatures, but the pressure mounted — ‘It was such a special thing, it was for The King. I really couldn’t mess up’ — and the Lilliputian dimensions within which she needed to work (the miniature measures 1½in by a little less than 1¼in) didn’t help. ‘The King wears a lot of medals, so that was quite difficult, because I had to place them on that minute scale and get each one in exactly right: if I got one wrong, the whole lot would have been out of whack. The thing about miniatures is that there’s no room for error; you cannot get a hair wrong.’ She used sable micro brushes, but even so, she recalls: ‘I literally could not breathe when I was doing the brushstrokes and I had to wait till my heartbeat slowed down, [otherwise] your hand moves and I’d have had a big blob in the wrong spot.’ A self-confessed perfectionist, she worked long hours cramped over the tiny picture — ‘you become very cold,’ she reveals — for six days a week and would have worked seven, ‘except my husband insisted I took a day off’.

The miniature was ready in time for the Emperor and Empress of Japan’s 2024 visit ‘and they offered to send a car to pick it up’. However, Mrs Meek wouldn’t have it: ‘I didn’t want any accident between here [her studio in East Sussex] and there [Buckingham Palace]. I thought “if anything is going to happen, it’s going to be me that does it, not anyone else”.’

Fortunately, the train ride was smooth and there is no doubt the miniature was a resounding success. Not only has The Queen sported it, with a diamond-studded frame, at state functions, including as a resplendent complement to Elizabeth II’s sapphire parure during last month’s visit by French President Emmanuel Macron, but the Palace has also had four photographic replicas — so well reproduced that you can’t tell them from the original, except for their slightly smaller size — made for The Princess of Wales, The Princess Royal, The Duchess of Edinburgh and The Duchess of Gloucester. ‘It seemed a bit surreal when I looked at the news and saw my painting at the state banquet,’ confesses Elizabeth, before adding: ‘I’m tentatively quite proud of it.’

Elizabeth Meek’s miniatures will be in the Royal Miniature Society’s annual exhibition at Bankside Gallery, London SE1, November 18–22

This feature originally appeared in the August 6, 2025, issue of Country Life. Click here for more information on how to subscribe