This portrait of Dr. Joseph Youle is part of a pair, accompanying a mourning scene honoring the doctor’s brief but remarkable life (2004.18.2). After completing a dissertation about the chemistry of respiration, he graduated from Columbia College: the first American academic institution to confer medical degrees. A political activist, he served as a scribe to the Council of Tammany, a Republican organization that would eventually dominate New York City politics. A man of letters, he was a member of the Calliopean Society, which published amateur literary efforts. Youle married Jane Byvanck on February 17, 1794. He died a year later, one month before his daughter’s birth. The young doctor probably treated patients struck by the yellow fever epidemic, and he likely became one of its victims.

A versatile craftsman, Philip Parisen may have created the case for this miniature in addition to painting the portrait on the obverse. Parisen was a miniaturist, silhouettist, hairworker, silversmith, and jeweler in New York, where he married Jane Loundes around 1790. From 1789 to 1790, he and his father, Otto Paul de Parisen, were business partners in silversmithing. He joined the General Society of Mechanics and Tradesmen of New York City in 1810.