France, ca. 1815. Miniature oil painting (visible diameter 6.5 cm) in contemporary (original?) square black wooden frame (12.4 x 11.8 cm) with round, ornamental copper inner border.

This fine, detailed portrait shows a man believed to be the early 19th-century French-German (later American) polymath (principally botanist, zoologist, archaeologist, linguist, explorer, and Darwinist before Darwin), Constantine Samuel Rafinesque Schmalz (1783-1840), although he is not formally identified on the portrait. The sitter is depicted in a landscape with a lake and trees. This is highly unusual - the background in such portraits is nearly always either black, featureless, or showing an interior - and strongly suggests that he is an outdoor person, and quite possibly a botanist, agriculturist and/or naturalist. The likeness with the other known (miniature) portraits of Rafinesque is stunning, in particular with his self-portrait (Strack, Fig. 2), which is botanically themed too, but also with his well-known engraved portrait (Strack, Fig. 1), known to be made after a lost drawing or oil painting. These three surely group together. Less alike is a portrait of a, supposedly, much younger Rafinesque, which shows a man with a much narrower face. Strack, H. L. (2022). Discovery of a miniature portrait of Constantine Samuel Rafinesque (New York, 1818). Archives of Natural History 49(1): 204-207.