Born Lexington, Massachusetts

John Singleton Copley painted Thomas and Lydia Hancock, pillars of Boston society and aunt and uncle to the patriot John Hancock, near the beginning of his career. Copley trained himself in making paintings “in littel,” as oil-on-copper miniatures were then known; the more fashionable European technique of using watercolor on ivory was not yet well established in the colonies.

Copley painted Thomas Hancock first, around 1758. After his death, Hancock’s widow had her portrait done in miniature by Copley. The artist then set his original miniature into a larger, oval piece of copper to match her portrait so that they could be displayed as framed pendants.

Born Boston, Massachusetts

John Singleton Copley painted Thomas and Lydia Hancock, pillars of Boston society and aunt and uncle to the patriot John Hancock, near the beginning of his career. Copley trained himself in making paintings “in littel,” as oil-on-copper miniatures were then known; the more fashionable European technique of using watercolor on ivory was not yet well established in the colonies.

Copley painted Thomas Hancock first, around 1758. After his death, Hancock’s widow had her portrait done in miniature by Copley. The artist then set his original miniature into a larger, oval piece of copper to match her portrait so that they could be displayed as framed pendants.

Born Kirkbean, Scotland

Acclaimed in Paris after his spectacular victory in the August 23, 1779, ship-to-ship duel between the Bonhomme Richard and the British Serapis, John Paul Jones was “feasted and caressed” by highborn ladies, one of whom painted this miniature. “You have made me in love with my own Picture because you have condescended to Draw it,” the Scottish adventurer-turned-hero wrote to the married artist, enclosing a lock of his hair and the promise of “a Cypher for a key to our future correspondence.”

Born Charleston (formerly Charles Town), South Carolina

Serving as an aide-de-camp to General George Washington, John Laurens demonstrated bravery, even recklessness, in battle. Taken prisoner in May 1780, he commissioned this tiny portrait in Philadelphia following his parole, probably as a memento for his wife, who was living in England with their young daughter. In 1781, Laurens obtained France’s commitment to station a fleet off the American coast, enabling Washington’s army to defeat the British forces at Yorktown.

Born Thurso, Caithness County, Scotland

Arthur St. Clair attained the rank of major general during the American Revolution. He was again given that rank in the American army in 1791, only to retire in 1792 after his troops were defeated by Indian tribes in the Northwest Territory. St. Clair’s portrait was painted in oils by the French artist Jean Pierre Henri Elouis in Philadelphia, and may have been intended as the basis for an engraving for public view; this miniature was probably created at the same time, but as a private keepsake.

Born Redding, Connecticut

An intellectual and diplomat, Revolutionary War veteran Joel Barlow spent many years abroad. In 1787 he wrote “The Vision of Columbus,” one of the first epic poems celebrating American progress. William Dunlap, an artist and dramatist, traveled the East Coast beginning in 1805, painting miniatures to support his family. According to family letters, he met Barlow in February 1806 in Washington, D.C. This signed and dated portrait contrasts the richness of the dramatic background with Barlow’s carefully depicted features.

Born Philadelphia, Pennsylvania

America’s first literary professional, Charles Brockden Brown produced six important novels between 1798 and 1801, and was also a magazine contributor and editor. He and William Dunlap were lifelong friends; this miniature was painted when Brown had settled into married life and his journalistic work, and just a few years before his death from tuberculosis. It is a fine example of the luminosity possible with transparent watercolor on ivory.

Born Kingston (formerly North Kingstown), Rhode Island

Sarah Goodridge, a New England miniaturist who took informal instruction from Gilbert Stuart in the early 1820s, painted this miniature at Stuart’s request around 1825. He was then the most famous artist in Boston, and Goodridge was taken with his formidable personality and craggy features. As Stuart’s daughter recorded, “[Goodridge] seemed to be quite overcome at the idea. . . . [The miniature] is the most life-like of anything ever painted of him.” Goodridge made at least three nearly identical miniatures, and the image was engraved.

Born East Sudbury, Massachusetts

A self-taught artist, Josiah Hawes (left), shown with his brothers, earned his living for more than a decade as an itinerant painter of portrait miniatures and other works before turning to daguerreotypy in 1841. Two years later he joined A. Southworth & Co., the Boston daguerreian gallery that soon would be known as Southworth & Hawes. Hawes shared camera duties with Albert Sands Southworth, who cited his partner’s credentials as an artist in advertisements promoting their portrait business, a partnership that endured until 1862.

Born Northampton, Massachusetts

Benjamin Tappan was a multifaceted, larger-than-life antebellum figure. Trained as a lawyer in New England, he soon moved west to Ohio. In 1838 he was elected to the Senate. His portrait was probably painted when Boston-based miniaturist Washington Blanchard was in Virginia in 1839; the image was engraved by 1840. Rectangular cases like this one, used for painted miniatures at this time, began to be utilized for daguerreotypes in the 1840s.

Born in the Waxhaw Settlement, South Carolina

In October 1840, the city of New Orleans hosted a Silver Jubilee for Andrew Jackson and his spectacular victory over the British on January 8, 1815. This contemporaneous portrait of the aging hero, white-haired and in poor health, was created by James Tooley Jr., a young Mississippi miniaturist. Tooley, who was already working in the city, obtained permission to make a copy from a larger oil portrait of Jackson created during the Jubilee. Tooley gave the portrait to his great-grandmother, and it descended in his family until its acquisition by the Portrait Gallery.

Born Hardin County, Kentucky

Mathew Brady’s first portrait of Abraham Lincoln played a significant role in shaping Lincoln’s public image during the 1860 presidential campaign. Taken on February 27, 1860—the day Lincoln delivered his stirring address on slavery at the Cooper Union in New York City—Brady’s carefully crafted image revealed a candidate whose dignified bearing stood in sharp contrast to the unflattering characterizations spread by his detractors. In the run up to the November election, Brady’s Lincoln portrait circulated in a variety of formats, including this broochlike campaign pin by Boston photographer George Clark, who created it by copying Brady’s original.

Born Hardin County, Kentucky

Lincoln was becoming a national celebrity during the summer of 1860, but some worried that his looks might cost him votes. Philadelphia supporter John M. Read hired John Henry Brown to make a good, small portrait that would serve as the basis for a printed campaign image. Brown had five sittings with the candidate but also based the image on several ambrotypes taken in Illinois. Lincoln’s secretary thought the result was “so well executed that when magnified to life size one cannot discover any defects of brush marks on it at all.” Mrs. Lincoln requested that Read give the portrait to her, and it descended in the family until 1975.

Born Canada

Born Dominique La Plante in French Canada, Chief Thundercloud of the Blackfoot tribe was a well-known artist’s model and at one time a member of Buffalo Bill’s Wild West Show. While the precise circumstances surrounding the creation of this work are unknown, presumably the young painter Eulabee Dix and Chief Thundercloud interacted while he was modeling in New York and she was studying at the Art Students League around 1900–1902. Dix was learning to paint on ivory at the time, and this vibrantly colored likeness was probably one of the first miniatures she completed in that medium.

Born Florida, Missouri

Before 1908, author Mark Twain sat for very few painted portraits. However, when Eulabee Dix wrote to ask him to lunch—and subsequently to pose for her—he gave her five one-hour sittings. Dix later wrote about Twain’s exuberant conversational topics, ranging from his daughter to techniques for washing his white hair. Twain also remembered his time with Dix fondly; this was the final portrait of him done from life. While usually depicted in his trademark white suit, here he also wears the scarlet and gray robes of a doctor of letters, an honorary degree that Oxford University conferred on him in 1907.

Born Niles, Ohio

Many of the artists of the miniature revival at the turn of the century were women. Emily Drayton Taylor had studied painting in Paris and in Philadelphia before she began her career as a miniaturist in the early 1890s, after having three children. She was a great promoter of the art, and through her growing reputation, she was invited to Washington to make a pair of miniature portraits of President and Mrs. McKinley in the spring of 1899. This portrait, a slightly larger version of the likeness at the White House, descended in the artist’s family.

Born Hanoverton, Ohio

Thomas Corwin Mendenhall, a physicist and professor at Ohio State University, became president of Worcester Polytechnic Institute in 1894. This miniature of him was painted in 1918 by his former Ohio State pupil Annie Ware Sabine Siebert. Wallace Siebert, the artist’s brother, wrote of her talents: “You always seem to get the essence of a man, that which does not change with lapse of time.” A remarkable woman of her era, Siebert became the first recipient of a master of arts degree from Ohio State in 1886 and one of the first women to earn an architecture degree from MIT.

Born near Eatonton, Georgia

Joel Chandler Harris, a journalist, humorist, and author of the Uncle Remus stories, lived across the street in Atlanta, Georgia, from Lucy May Stanton when she was a child. She often sat on his knee, listening to his animal stories. When she first asked to paint him in 1906, he queried her desire to paint “an old buzzard like me.” This is a second, larger portrait created after Harris’s death, and it shows off Stanton’s loose and flowing technique, with puddles and washes of pure color. It won the Medal of Honor at the Pennsylvania Society of Miniature Painters Exhibition in 1917.

Born New York City?

During the British occupation of New York City at the height of the American Revolution, Margaret Todd Whetten and her daughter, Margaret Whetten Dean, provided food and clothing for the American prisoners of the British army. The Whetten home also occasionally served as a refuge for American spies. After the war, George Washington personally thanked Mrs. Whetten for her service. These hand-colored wax portraits are similar to those made by Johann Christian Rauschner, a German artist who worked in New York in 1799, and again from 1802 to 1808. The fine details are characteristic of this unusual portrait medium.

Born New York City?

During the British occupation of New York City at the height of the American Revolution, Margaret Todd Whetten and her daughter, Margaret Whetten Dean, provided food and clothing for the American prisoners of the British army. The Whetten home also occasionally served as a refuge for American spies. After the war, George Washington personally thanked Mrs. Whetten for her service. These hand-colored wax portraits are similar to those made by Johann Christian Rauschner, a German artist who worked in New York in 1799, and again from 1802 to 1808. The fine details are characteristic of this unusual portrait medium.

Probably born in France

Englishman James Smithson commissioned this forthright portrait from a Belgian artist working in present-day Aachen, possibly as a gift for a family member. Always painfully aware of his uncertain status as an illegitimate child of the Duke of Northumberland, he focused on his scientific publishing in chemistry and mineralogy. In 1826 he penned his most unusual will, providing for the establishment of the “Smithsonian Institution, an Establishment for the increase & diffusion of knowledge among men.”

Born Augusta County, Virginia

George Caleb Bingham moved with his family to the Missouri frontier in 1819. The young Bingham soon earned his living as a portraitist, augmenting his studies in Philadelphia in the late 1830s. By the early 1850s his anecdotal scenes depicting life along the sparsely settled Mississippi River, such as The Jolly Flatboatmen, were regarded as pictorial embodiments of the romance of the American wilderness. Bingham painted this self-portrait on a quarter-plate sheet of copper, which was intended as a support for a daguerreotype. He probably made it as a private memento for one of his kinsmen, for it belonged to family members for many years.

Born Atlanta, Georgia

Lucy May Stanton was best known for her impressionistic watercolor-on-ivory portrait miniatures. She lived mostly in Georgia, but studied art in Paris around the turn of the century. An advocate for women’s suffrage, Stanton was also well known in the art centers of New York, Philadelphia, and Boston. She presents herself in this large-scale portrait, The Silver Goblet, in a forthright, no-nonsense pose, and displays her virtuosity in handling the watercolor medium. She followed the traditional technique of roughening the surface of the ivory so that pigment would adhere to it, but then tilted her workboard to move the flow of the washes. In “puddling,” an innovative wet-in-wet technique, she allowed broad pools of color to shift over the surface and then dry, leaving a rich texture. Stanton also designed this frame, a fine example of the Arts and Crafts style.