Pier Francesco Mola (1612-66) was an Italian painter and draughtsman. He was born near Lugano but his family settled in Rome in 1616. He travelled in northern Italy between 1633 and 1640, and again in 1641-7. He was an excellent draughtsman and a witty and humorous caricaturist. He painted frescoes in Roman churches and palaces, and small-scale scenes based on mythological and biblical subjects. His most important public commission was a fresco of Joseph and his Brothers for the Palazzo del Quirinale, Rome (1656–7), under the direction of Pietro da Cortona. His best-known painting is the Barbary Pirate (1650, Paris, Louvre). In 1666, Louis XIV of France called him to become court painter with an offer of 6,000 scudi a year, but as Mola was preparing to leave Rome he fell ill and died. The Royal Collection holds several of his drawings.

This miniature is one of the collection of copies of 224 self-portraits by artists in the Uffizi Palace, Florence, that Lord Cowper, the art collector and patron, commissioned Giuseppe Macpherson (1726-1780) to paint. He presented the miniatures to King George III in two batches, in 1773 and 1786. Macpherson followed the original self-portraits quite closely, but copied only the head and shoulders. He inscribed the artists' names on the backs of the miniatures – several differ from those in the modern Uffizi catalogue, notably: Bazzi, Bellini, Campi, Annibale Carracci, Gabbiani, Masaccio, Metsys, Moroni, Pencz, Licinio, Schiavone and Spada. None of the miniatures is signed, apart from Macpherson's own self-portrait, which is inscribed: Giuseppe Macpherson / Autore della serie (Giuseppe Macpherson / Author of the series).Macpherson was born in Florence, the son of Donald Macpherson, a footman in the service of Alexander, 2nd Duke of Gordon. He was a pupil of Pompeo Batoni and painted miniatures and enamel portraits in Italy, France and Germany, finally settling in Florence. A James Macpherson is recorded in London and Paris in 1754 but it is not certain that this is the same person. He was described in 1776 as having a special talent for painting on enamel and as being 'almost the only painter in Europe who possesses this art to perfection'. He had a distinguished client list which included some of the crowned heads and dignitaries of Europe. In 1778, he was invited to add his own self-portrait to the famous painters in the grand duke's collection as it 'would do honour to Florence to enrich the collection with a work which shows that we still have some men of true merit' according to Giuseppe Pelli, director of the Uffizi at the time.