Born in Milton, Connecticut, Anson Dickinson apprenticed to a silversmith in Litchfield, Connecticut, in 1796, and first advertised as an artist in the local press in 1802. He briefly received instruction from the celebrated miniaturist Edward Greene Malbone, who painted Dickinson’s portrait in 1804. Dickinson’s more than fifteen hundred commissions reveal that he traveled extensively along the East Coast but worked mainly in Connecticut and New York. Dickinson was widely admired by many of his contemporaries, including Malbone, the master of Federal-era miniatures, and Gilbert Stuart, the famous oil portraitist.

Dickinson painted miniature portraits of General Epaphroditus Champion and his wife, Lucretia, as a pair. At the time they were painted, the Champions had been married for forty-four years. Typical of Dickinson’s patrons, the Champions, of East Haddam, Connecticut, held a distinguished position in society. The intimate mood and relatively soft, washy palette of this portrait of Lucretia Champion and that of her husband, suggest the couple’s preference for earlier miniature conventions. Their dress is also somewhat old-fashioned, with Lucretia’s eyelet cap and ruff reflecting trends from around 1819. While aesthetically the portraits look to the past, the rectangular red-leather cases look forward, anticipating the daguerreotype cases of later decades.