Jeremiah Meyer RA (1735 - 1789)

RA Collection: People and Organisations

Jeremiah Meyer was a German-born artist who served as Miniature Painter to Queen Charlotte, Enamel Painter to King George III and was a Founder Member of the Royal Academy.

Meyer was born into an artistic family in Tübingen, Germany, where his father was the official portrait painter to the Duke of Württemberg. Meyer was sent to England as a teenager to study under Christian Friedrich Zincke, an established German miniature painter who lived and worked in London. He may have attended classes at the artist William Hogarth’s Academy on St Martin’s Lane.

By 1761, Meyer had established himself as a pre-eminent painter of miniatures and completed his first royal commissions, including a miniature of King George III on ivory set in a diamond ring, which was given to his bride, Princess Charlotte of Mecklenburg-Strelitz, on their wedding day. In the same year Meyer won a gold medal from the Society of Arts for a profile drawing of the new king, designed to be used on coinage. Shortly after this, he became a naturalised British citizen and married an English flower painter named Barbara Marsden, who had won several premiums from the Society of Arts herself.

In 1764, Meyer was appointed Miniature Painter to Queen Charlotte and Enamel Painter to King George III. Many of his works are still in the Royal Collection today. Meyer’s official royal patronage made him an obvious candidate for inclusion in the Royal Academy of Arts, which was formed with the King’s blessing in 1768. He and his fellow Royal Academician George Michael Moser were considered two of the finest enamellists working in the country at the time.

Meyer regularly presented miniatures, enamels and watercolours at the Royal Academy’s annual exhibitions, but his most notable contribution to the future of the Academy may have been his successful motion to establish a pension fund for Royal Academicians in financial need, a resolution that was passed in 1775. Meyer stopped exhibiting works in the early 1780s and retired to Kew, where he died in 1789.