A late-nineteenth-century copy by an inferior hand after a portrait of Fanny Kemble of 1783 by Sir Joshua Reynolds. The painting thought to be the original of this type, exhibited RA 1784 (183), is now in the National Museum, Havana, Cuba (Mannings 2000, no. 1027). The ribbons and high arrangement of hair at the back of the sitter's head do not follow the format of Reynolds's original and may be a later addition to the miniature.

Frances 'Fanny' Kemble, daughter of Roger Kemble, theatrical actor-manager, and sister of the actress Sarah Siddons and of actors John and Charles Kemble. She had a successful early career on stage and returned to life in the theatre to support herself after divorcing her husband Pierce Butler, an American plantation owner, in 1847. She wrote several Memoirs including a Journal of a Residence on a Georgian Plantation in 1838–1839 (1863).