Born in New Haven, Connecticut, Nathaniel Jocelyn worked as a portrait painter and engraver. While a young man, Jocelyn received art instruction from George Munger, who painted this portrait of his pupil. Jocelyn first apprenticed at a very young age with his father, a watch- and clockmaker, before trying his hand at drawing, engraving, and painting. After working under Munger, Jocelyn painted portraits in Savannah, Georgia, for several years before returning to New Haven, where he painted many of the city’s most notable citizens. Jocelyn was an abolitionist and is perhaps best known for his sympathetic portrait of Cinqué, an enslaved man from Sierra Leone who was a leader in the slave revolt aboard the ship Amistad in 1839. Jocelyn was also instrumental in the establishment of the Yale Art School and served as its first Curator and Counselor of Art.

Born in Guilford, Connecticut, George Munger spent his working years in New Haven, painting miniatures and portraits in oil. Munger was a distant relative of the miniaturist Anson Dickinson, and the two likely worked together at times. According to William Dunlap’s History of the Rise and Progress of the Arts of Design in the United States (1834), Munger suffered a severe case of smallpox in his early adulthood, leaving him unable to work for eleven years. He resumed painting in 1816 to create what Dunlap called “miniatures of extraordinary merit” until his death in 1824.