Ozias Humphry (or Humphrey) RA (8 September 1742 – 9 March 1810)[1] was a leading English painter of portrait miniatures, later oils and pastels, of the 18th century.
Humphry is the spelling Ozias himself used in his signature[2] on the backing card of his miniature of Charlotte, Princess Royal (1769; Windsor Castle).
His problems with his sight, which ultimately led to blindness, began in the early 1770s and forced him to paint larger works in oils and pastel.
[6] He traveled to Italy in 1773 with his great friend George Romney, stopping en route at Knole, near Sevenoaks in Kent, where the Duke of Dorset commissioned several works from him.
On his return, his numerous subjects included George Stubbs (1777), fellow academician Dominic Serres, the chemist Joseph Priestley, and allegedly a portrait claimed to be of the teenage Jane Austen, from perhaps as early as 1790 (clothing styles suggest a later date), known as the "Rice" portrait after a later owner, though this has always been a controversial attribution of the sitter.