Peter Oliver's self-portrait was incorrectly identified as a portrait of the dramatist Ben Jonson (1572/3-1637) from the early eighteenth century, when it was in the collection of Dr Richard Mead (1673-1754). Peter Oliver's appearance is well-known through a signed pencil self-portrait (National Portrait Gallery, London) and also from an oil portrait by Adriaen Hanneman (405518; Royal Collection) and appears to be entirely consistent with the sitter represented in the present miniature.

The purchase of the miniature as an image of Ben Jonson illuminates the Prince of Wales's interest in collecting portraits of literary and historical characters, a preference which he shared with his mother, Caroline of Ansbach.

Peter Oliver was the eldest son of Isaac Oliver (c.1565-1617), court limner to Anne of Denmark. He was trained in the art of miniature painting by his father and introduced by him to royal patronage, which he enjoyed as a member of Charles I's household from 1625 onwards. Although the early work of Peter Oliver can be difficult to distinguish from that of his father, his later miniatures exhibit broader and freer handling than is to be found in his father's work. The overall impression in Peter Oliver's work is one of greater softness, and the sense of relaxed informality here is one which was quite alien to his father's self-portraits (see 420034; Royal Collection). The dramatic Baroque pose is also an advance on Isaac Oliver's compositions and heralds the more flamboyant self-portraiture of artists such as Van Dyck in the following decade. In acquiring this work for his collection, Frederick unwittingly added to the Royal Collection an important and revealing work by the early seventeenth-century miniature painter whose versatile and accomplished output has often been overshadowed by his father's reputation.

During the 1620s Peter Oliver made increasing use of gessoed cards as secondary supports for the vellum on which his miniatures are painted. The fact that this miniature is laid on plain card suggests a date in the early 1620s. This would accord with the apparent age of the sitter, who would have been twenty-six in 1620.

Text adapted from The First Georgians: Art and Monarchy 1714-1760, London, 2014.