Rectangular miniature in watercolour on ivory, unframed but in a larger rectangular beige card mount, with a gilded edge to the window. It is a pair with MNT0073, which shows the the sitter's husband, the naval surveyor Henry Laird Cox. Mrs Cox is shown bust length, half-turned to her left against a brownish background, but with her head facing out to the viewer. Her shoulders are bare over an almost straight-topped black gown with a broad white-lace edge band. At the central join of this she wears a cameo brooch apparently showing a male head in left profile. She also wears a red silk mantle low around the shoulders. Her hair is fair, parted centrally and worn fairly short and straight, bobbed over her ears. Her eyes appear to be hazel but, unfortunately, what must have been a fine image of a beautiful lady has suffered damage, including significant loss of pigment on the face, hair and neck. The ivory support is also cracked.

Elizabeth Cox was from a naval family, her grandfather being John Crispo (1773-1841) who, as a 9-year-old midshipman, was one of the relative minority of those who survived the rapid accidental sinking of the 'Royal George' at Spithead in 1782. He became a lieutenant of 1790, a captain in 1810 and in the mid-1820s was a director of the British Steam and Patent Navigation Company. The Museum has an oil portrait of him as a commander, in the 'Telemachus' ,1797 (BHC2637). Elizabeth was daughter of his son John William Crispo (d. 1857), a lieutenant of 1815, and his wife Hannah Miles. She appears to have been born in 1821 since her baptism took place at St Mary's, Woodbridge, Suffolk, on 8 March that year. (An Elizabeth Jane Crispo, of unrecorded parentage at her baptism at Portsea, Hants, on 11 June 1815 may have been an older sibling but, if so, probably an infant death whose name was repeated for a later child.) Elizabeth was certainly the eldest of the Crispo daughters when she married Henry Laird Cox at St Mary's, Kennington, London on 17 April 1845, since this was stated in a Cornish newspaper announcement of the wedding which also named her father as 'Lieut. Crispo, R.N. of Montreal, Canada': this suggests that the Crispos were of Cornish origin and that he had emigrated some time after retiring on half-pay in 1835. What family the Coxes had, and when she died, is not yet known other than they had grandchildren by the name of Roe.

This miniature bears the artist's usual full inscription on the back: 'Mrs Cox. Painted by William Egley, / 75 Connaught Terrace, Hyde Park. Feby. 4 1847.'