In the early nineteenth-century United States, miniature portraits of family members, painted on ivory and typically bestowed on other family members as gifts, became extremely popular reflecting the growing importance of affection as a family value. The periods expanding market for miniatures was fueled by the labor of female artists, who charged a fraction of the commissions demanded by their male competitors. Especially in urban areas, middle-class families took advantage of the competitive, gendered labor market to amass multiple representations of kin Miniatures depicting children, parents, siblings, and other kin heightened the genre’s broadly domestic associations. So, too, did the growing number of women who commissioned paintings. While full-sized oil paintings were quite expensive miniatures were generally attainable for middle-class women making them affordable luxuries.