An interesting quote on Robert Field:

Robert Field’s miniature of Charles Carnan Ridgely Jr., painted in 1800 while the artist was en route from Philly to Washington, shows [the boy] at the age of sixteen…scholar Harry Piers commented: “It is Field’s only known portrait of so young a lad.” Indeed, for reasons unknown, the artist seems to have painted children only on very rare occasions. In general, teenage boys were relatively infrequent subjects for portrait miniatures, which often commemorated rites of passage Past the threat of childhood disease and too young for marriage, adolescents were in an awkward transitional state that apparently few parents of the time desired to record in this most intimate art form.

–Page 175, Aronson, Julie, and Wieseman, Marjorie E. Perfect Likeness: European and American Portrait Miniatures from the Cincinnati Art Museum, Yale University Press, 2006.