A young girl, in the guise of Diana the Huntress, full length, in blue dress with white underdress and sleeves fastened with pearl slides, orange skirt and floating gauze veil, pearl necklace and earrings, a crescent in her long flowing brown hair, holding a bow and arrow, the head of her greyhound beside her; wooded landscape background; gold border

This cabinet miniature may be compared to the portrait of Princess Mary, later Queen Mary (1662-1694) by Sir Peter Lely in the Royal Collection where the sitter is walking in a landscape dressed as Diana with the head of a greyhound (Oliver Millar, The Tudor.Stuart and Early Georgian Pictures in the Collection of Her Majesty The Queen, London, 1963, no. 249, illustrated pl. 103). It is tempting to suggest that this miniature is a portrait of her younger sister, the future Queen Anne (1665-1714) as a child.
Richard Gibson, the dwarf, was page to Charles I and painted miniatures for him and at the Court of Charles II. Gibson married Anne Shepherd, also a dwarf, and they are immortalised in Sir Peter Lely's portrait of them. The association with Lely is well documented and Gibson is known to have copied his works in miniature (G. Reynolds, English Portrait Miniatures, Cambridge, 1988, p. 75).
In 1672 Richard Gibson was appointed 'Picturemaker' to King Charles II and was succeeded a year later by Nicholas Dixon but was then given the post of drawing master to the daughters of the Duke of York, Princesses Mary and Anne. He became very close to Mary and accompanied her to Holland on her marriage to William of Orange in 1677 and resided at The Hague.
For an updated account on Richard Gibson, see J. Murdoch, Seventeenth-century English Miniatures, London, 1997, pp. 173-199.