Of English descent, John Henry Hill was the third and final representative of the Hill family artistic dynasty. He was the son of John William Hill (1812-1879), the American Pre-Raphaelite painter influenced by John Ruskin, and the grandson of John Hill (1770-1850), the esteemed engraver of many seminal early American landscapes, among them The Hudson River Portfolio (1820-25) after watercolors by William Guy Wall. Not surprisingly, John Henry Hill studied under his father and in 1856 exhibited for the first time at the National Academy of Design. Three years later he became an associate member, and thereafter exhibited his watercolors, aquatints, and etchings in New York City and Philadelphia. In 1864-65 he spent about eight months in England, studying the work of J.M.W. Turner and other British artists. He published twenty-four of his etchings in 1867 under the title Sketches from Nature. In 1868 he went West, accompanying Clarence King's surveying expedition in California, Nevada, Idaho, and Utah. A decade later, in 1878, he made a second visit to England, subsequently traveling on the Continent the following year. After his father's death he returned home and in 1888 he published An Artist's Memorial in honor of him.

Born in Hartford, Connecticut, Behnke earned a BFA from Pratt Institute (1969), and an MA from New York University (1976). Her attachment to the iconography of the city, where she presently lives, coupled with her childhood memories of a mid-century country and suburban living in Connecticut have given rise to a particular dichotomy in her work: the contrasts of nature and civilization, or of structure and artifice. Her style can be characterized as "conceptual realism," and she likes to work in series one whose sub themes frequenty pivots around reflections. She has had multiple solo shows at the Fischbach Gallery and has particpated in many group exhibitions. Her works are found in many corporate collections, as well as at the Currier Gallery of Art, Manchester, New Hamsphire, Georgetown University, Washington, D.C., MIT, List Visual Arts Center, Cambridge, and the New York Public Library. The format of the offered work, painted on two pieces of heavy watercolor paper with deckled edges, is a play on the fourteenth- and fifteenth-century Italian Renaissance altarpiece formula: a polyptych with a main panel and a predella, consisting of one of several panels. It was in the predella where pioneering naturalists loke Masaccio, Fra Angelico, and Gentile da Fabriano made early explorations into expansive panoramic landscapes. Behnke's main vertically-oriented scene manipulates the space on 42nd Street near Grand Central Station (seen at the left). She twists the foreground space punctuated by various marquees of the landmark station and its taxi stands to involve the viewer and lend immediacy to their experience of the work. The main focus of the slice of Manhattan view, seen from below, is the Chrysler building, partially blocked by the glass façade of the Hyatt Hotel. Behnke's staining technique lends a boldness to the watercolor and softens what could have been the hard edges of the architecture in this kaleidescope view of twilight descending on the metropolis as the lights in the crown of the Chrysler Building turn on. By contrast, the predella contains a horizontal daylight view of Manhattan from the Empire State Building looking towards Queens with the Chrysler Building at the left.

Gifford Beal was born in New York, graduated from Princeton in 1900 and studied art under William Merritt Chase for ten years. He also worked with George Bridgman and Frank Vincent DuMond at the Art Students League. Beal's specialties were marine and figure painting; among his favorite subjects were circus scene and Central Park. In the mid 1920's, he produced a series of painting portraying fishermen at work. He also did considerable mural painting; among them; panels portraying the life of the scientist John Henry at Princeton and a mural in the Department of the Interior building, Washington, D.C. Beal was president of the Art Students League from 1914 to1929, received many awards and is represented in many museum collections. He was a member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters and was honored with a memorial exhibition there in 1957. Antoinette Kraushaar, a distinguished New York art dealer, was a devoted promoter of the work of the Eight and American 20th-century realist artists including Beal. The sitter's father John Kraushaar had inherited the gallery founded by his brother Charles W. Kraushaar in 1917; the year that George Luks had painted a full length portrait of the young Antoinette (The Brooklyn Museum). By the time Beal painted his charming likeness around 1925, Miss Kraushaar had probably joined her father in the family firm; when he died in 1946, she took over the gallery. This informal bust length portrait shows the sitter in profile looking to the left and seated at a round table before a piano. Her elegant features and upswept hair are poised against the light surface of the sheet music on the piano, above which hangs an old fashioned male portrait whose dark garb sets off the light hair and pink frock of the modern young woman. A bouquet of boldly painted brilliant summer flowers sits atop the piano at the left, suggesting that the location is Rockport, Massachusetts where both the Beal and the Kraushaar families summered during the 1920s. Beal's open strokes, light palette, and the glimpse he offers of a homey Victorian interior reinforce the relaxed, even intimate, tone of this charming portrait as does the artist's affectionate inscription "To Antoinette."