小像, Miniature - Cellule de Religieuse - 6 cm - Velvet, カートン, Textile

From the eighteenth century to the 1960s, thousands of religious sisters in Europe made miniature models of their cell and the convent in glass boxes, eggs, shells, or walnut shells. They depicted themselves in miniature, in the form of wax dolls, paper silhouettes, and photographs, at work or in prayer, surrounded by the objects of their daily life meticulously reconstructed. They offered them to their families and patrons in order to show their life away from the convent walls. If these small cells attracted the interest of ethnographers, collectors, and artists—such as the Provençal poet Frédéric Mistral or the multimedia artist Léna Vandrey—they have been little studied, even though their making was widespread in the nineteenth century.