Portrait of a Young Boy

This portrait of an unidentified little boy wearing appropriate dress for the 1830s, including pantaloons and black slippes, incorporates many of the attributes associated with the Boston portrait painter, Samuel Miller. Of the twenty or more portraits ascribed to Miller, the majority are full-length portraits of children who are portrayed frontally in a stiff, flatly delineated fashion. Miller enhanced his compositions through the use of bold colors, and engaging ambient details, such as family pets and pots of flowers, all of which are present in our painting. The fact that the little boy is listening to his father's gold pocket watch from which a gold chain with watch fob in the form of a pistol is suspended may suggest that it is a posthumous portrait, as his time has run out - tempus fugit.