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This article examines a miniature portrait of Clara Catharina Olbers (c. 1806–1808) by the Swedish miniature painter Johan Erik Bolinder in the collections of Nationalmuseum in Stockholm, and situates it in the historical context of the Gustavian art world. The portrait miniature of Olbers has, until now, been understood as a typical portrait of a woman at the beginning of the nineteenth century. However, this article reconsiders such assumptions by linking the portrait to three embroidered landscapes by the Olbers sisters in the collections of Nordiska museet. In so doing the article argues for the, often underestimated, significance of embroidered pictures in Swedish art in the late eighteenth and early decades of the nineteenth century, and at the Royal Swedish Academy of Fine Arts in particular.