The source for this portrait of celebrated patriot, silversmith, and engraver Paul Revere is an easel painting by Gilbert Stuart. It depicts the sitter as a distinguished man, years after the revolutionary activities—including his midnight ride to Lexington—that made him famous. Several copies were made after Stuart’s original, including this miniature by the youthful Gilbert Stuart Newton, Stuart’s nephew, executed about a year before Revere’s death.

Born in Halifax, Nova Scotia, Newton moved with his mother and siblings to Cambridge, Massachusetts, at the age of nine, following his father’s death. There he studied painting under his uncle. By 1817, Nephew and uncle grew to despise each other, and Newton left for Europe. He first visited Italy with his older brother and then traveled alone to London, where he stayed for the remainder of his life, working as a portrait and history painter. Newton’s literary genre subjects and portraits were painted in a fluent style, partially learned from his early emulation of Stuart. Newton studied at the Royal Academy, which made him a full academician in 1832. The same year, he returned to the United States to be married, bringing his bride back to England with him. Shortly thereafter he began suffering from mental illness and was placed in an asylum in Chelsea, where he continued to paint before dying of tuberculosis in 1835.