Description
John Singleton Copley’s Jeremiah Lee compresses the formality of a portrait into an intimate oval miniature. The gray-wigged sitter appears in a warm-toned coat, with his head and chest occupying the small painted field. In the displayed view, a jeweled brooch surrounds the likeness, emphasizing its compact, personal scale rather than the expansive setting of a large portrait hung across a room.
Painted around 1769 in watercolor on ivory, the miniature was commissioned while Copley was also making full-length oil portraits of Lee and his wife. The Metropolitan Museum of Art records this connection between the small image and the larger household paintings. Seen in that context, the miniature offers another way of preserving the same person’s likeness, with scale, delicate handling and its enclosing mount shaping the encounter.
Read our guide to giclée prints or browse the John Singleton Copley collection.
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