Portrait of David Tevele Schiff, Chief Rabbi of London

An Anglo-Jewish miniature painter, Martha Isaacs was likely the daughter of the embroiderer Levi Isaacs. She studied under the British landscape painter Thomas Burgess, prior to traveling to Calcutta, where she painted portraits of British subjects. There, Isaacs married a prominent English official, Alexander Higgins, following her conversion to Christianity. Isaacs exhibited her work with the Free Society of Artists in London, a group of artists who organized annual exhibitions of contemporary British art in the 1760s.