Cabinet painting

A cabinet painting (or "cabinet picture") is a small painting, typically no larger than about two feet in either dimension, but often much smaller. The term is especially used of paintings that show full-length figures at a small scale, as opposed to say a head painted nearly life-size, and that are painted very precisely, with a great degree of "finish". From the fifteenth century onwards wealthy collectors of art would keep such paintings in a cabinet, a relatively small and private room (often very small indeed, even in a very large house), to which only those with whom they were on especially intimate terms would be admitted.