The subject was the eldest son of Robert Livingston Cutting and Juliana (De Wolf) Cutting of New York. After graduating from Columbia College he joined his father's firm and in 1864 became a member of the New York Stock Exchange. A municipal reformer, he served on the Committee of Seventy which sought to oust the Tweed Ring from city government. The Spanish-born Madrazo, who worked most of his life in France, began to a make a specialty of portraiture in the 1870s.

Dorman Bridgman Eaton graduated from Harvard Law School and was admitted in 1850 to the bar in New York, where he practiced until 1870. In 1873 he was appointed chairman of the first Civil Service Commission, and ten years later drafted what became the Pendleton Act, creating a permanent civil service in the federal government. He retired in 1886 to study further the systems of municipal government. His portrait was a gift to the Society from his niece.

Wilberforce Eames was a librarian, editor, bibliographer, and scholar who held a series of positions with the Lenox Library and the New York Public Library from 1885 into the early twentieth century. He was a member of The New-York Historical Society and in 1931 was the second recipient of its gold medal "For Achievement in History." Following presentation of the medal, this portrait of Eames was unveiled.

John McComb III was the only son of John McComb, Jr., and Elizabeth (Glean) McComb.

Anthony Duane, who was born in Galway, Ireland, visited the colonies as a youth in the British navy in 1713 and settled in New York where he prospered as a merchant and shipowner. His large estate and surrounding lands were in the vicinity of what is now Greenwich Village. The portrait is copied, except for the face, from a mezzotint by John Smith (1718) after a painting by Sir Godfrey Kneller of Dudley Woodbridge.

John Ward Dunsmore was one of America's leading painters of murals and historical subjects in the late 19th and early 20th century. The Society owns about thirty of his completed paintings and hundreds of his preliminary works. During World War I, Dunsmore was a major in the army in charge of Red Cross activities. On the left half of this canvas is a preparatory work for a self-portrait in his military uniform. The right half of the divided canvas contains a sketch drawn for another portrait.

The subject, whose maiden name was Le Morteller, was the mother of Elizabeth (Dubois) Vail (Mrs. Aaron Vail, Sr.), the grandmother of Eugene and Aaron Vail, and the great-great-grandmother of Madame de Bon, wife of the donor.

Mary Livingston, the daughter of Robert Livingston, Jr., the third Lord of Livingston Manor, was married to James Duane on October 21, 1759. This portrait, although reversed, is virtually identical to Earl's painting of Mrs. Alexander Hamilton, now in the Museum of the City of New York. Both portraits were apparently completed while Earl was in debtor's prison in New York.

The painting depicts a common sad sight during the Depression, when, the artist recalls, homeless and jobless men built fires from scraps of wood to ward off the cold.