Julia Porter Dwight, the great-niece of Yale President Timothy Dwight, grew up in Brooklyn, New York. Her father, William Richard Dwight, was a merchant, banker and later proprietor of the New York Daily Advertiser. Her mother, Mary Warren Fiske, was the daughter of one of Amherst College's founders. This portrait, along with that of Julia's aunt Elizabeth Russell Fiske (2003.133.3), may have been painted by Eliza Goodridge in Boston during a family visit. The artist also painted miniatures of the girl's mother and grandparents. Goodridge situates Julia against one of her characteristically striated blue-green backgrounds, which segues into short strokes of brown immediately around the sitter to reinforce the paler tones of her skin and dress. The kitten is masterfully painted in controlled spiky hatches of gray watercolor that suggest the scratches of its paws as it claws the toy's blue ribbon. The relaxed strokes articulating Julia's white dress contrast with the stipple brushwork of her skin, underscoring the solidity of the toddler's youthful flesh. A November 1832 letter written by Julia's aunt Mary Alsop Dwight to her fiancé, Matthew Alexander Patrick, provides a glimpse of the Dwight's family life around the time this miniature was painted: "I wish you could see our parlour, in which I am writing, and you could hardly wonder at the appearance. My mother, aunt, cousin, brother, sister, and little niece [Julia] are all talking, singing and laughing."

Rather than emphasize the size disparity between adult viewers and her child sitter, Goodridge draws us down to Julia's level, where we meet the sober toddler's gaze directly. Her form fills the frame, in contrast to her tiny kitten, reinforcing the sense that the miniature presents a window into a child's world. With a growing awareness of the transience of each phase of child development, adults treasured the uniqueness of the moment in portable portraits like that of Julia, whose parents tenderly recorded their little daughter's playful love of cats. Julia never married and died in her thirties in Roxbury, Massachusetts, where she may have been visiting relatives.

Eliza Goodridge and her younger sister Sarah Goodridge were among the first women to paint miniatures professionally. They grew up in Templeton, Massachusetts, where their father, Ebenezer Goodridge, was a shoemaker. Sarah, who was largely self-taught as a miniaturist, trained her younger sister Eliza and supported herself, her mother, a paralytic brother, and an orphan niece. Sarah never married, but Eliza apparently stopped painting after her marriage late in life to Colonel Ephraim Stone of Templeton in 1849.