By 1893 photography was the dominant format for portrait miniatures. This portrait of Beatrix Jones, however, is painted in watercolor in a tradition recalling miniatures of an earlier era. The artist Emily Heyward Drayton Taylor depicts Jones as the Greek goddess Diana, dressed to attend a fancy-dress ball in Bar Harbor, Maine, to celebrate the sitter’s twenty-first birthday. The strong-willed mythological huntress was an appropriate model for the talented and ambitious Jones, who established a practice as a landscape architect in New York just two years after this miniature was painted. She later married Yale history professor Max Farrand and, as Beatrix Farrand, rose to acclaim as the designer of gardens at Dumbarton Oaks in Washington, DC, Yale University, and numerous other public and private locations. The artist and sitter shared a social and intellectual circle, which included author Henry James and Farrand’s aunt, novelist Edith Wharton.

In the mid-to-late 1870s Emily Heyward Drayton studied painting in Paris and at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts. She married Dr. John Madison Taylor in 1879 and the couple had three children. She began working as a miniaturist in 1893 and soon rose to prominence, painting over four hundred miniatures during her career. Taylor contributed to numerous exhibitions and promoted miniatures through writing and as a founder of the Pennsylvania Society of Miniature Painters. Taylor’s portrait of Farrand represents the resurgence of miniatures in the late nineteenth century. Artists, many of whom were women, fostered the revival through their reverence for hand-crafted objects in an increasingly industrialized world. Taylor insisted that her works be framed in lockets crafted to resemble Federal-period housings so that they could be cradled in the hand. Revival miniatures did not recapture the middle-class appeal lost to photography, but instead became a favorite art form among the elite.