This portrait miniature of Nathanael Greene is part of a set of five studies of Revolutionary War military officers painted by John Trumbull. A deputy to the Rhode Island Assembly, Greene became a brigadier general in the Continental army at the outbreak of the war. He was promoted to the rank of major general in 1776 and fought in two of the battles that Trumbull intended to paint: The Battle of Eutaw Springs (unexecuted) and The Capture of the Hessians at Trenton (1832.5), where Greene appears at the right on the light-colored horse. In 1786, when Trumbull heard of Greene's death, he wrote to his brother Jonathan Trumbull about the urgency of painting the people he wanted to include in his history paintings, now conscious "of the precariousness as well as the value of many other lives." Trumbull copied the portrait of Greene from the 1783 original by Charles Willson Peale at Independence Hall, Philadelphia.