Samuel Shelley, Anne Mee, and George Engleheart were prominent miniaturists who painted portraits of fashionable London society. Mee was the leading female miniaturist of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century. The daughter of a picture copyist, she was a pupil of the prominent painter, George Romney. A number of engravings were made after her miniatures, making them available to be mounted into extra-illustrated volumes or pasted on the wall. Engleheart studied with Reynolds and copied in miniature many of Reynolds's fullscale oil portraits. Upper-class sitters such as those pictured here would have commissioned portraits of themselves and their families from contemporary artists to add to the miniatures of their ancestors already accumulated and displayed in their homes.
