Thomas Jefferson Bryan acquired this painting, which he believed was by the seventeenth-century Spanish painter Diego Rodriguez de Silva y Velasquez, from the collection of R. W. Meade--a Philadelphian and a United States government employee who bought the painting in Spain. In fact, it is a very good studio copy after Velasquez's full-length "Portrait of Queen Mariana" in the Prado, Madrid. It has been suggested that this very fine copy may have been painted by Velasquez's son-in-law Juan Bautista Martinez Mazo. The sitter, Dona Mariana of Austria (1634-1696), married her uncle, Philip IV (1605-1665), to preserve Hapsburg control of Europe. Bryan believed that their daughter, the Infanta Margarita, portrayed in Velasquez's "Las Meninas," was the sitter in this portrait.

This study may possibly be Durrie's Hauling Wood in Winter which was sold for $100 at the auction of Durrie works at John Snedicor's Gallery, 768 Broadway, N.Y.C, on December 22, 1862, item 40.

Long known as Treason House for its association with the meeting on 9/22/1780 of Major-General Benedict Arnold and Major John Andre, adjutant-general of the British Army in North America, wherein they completed details for Arnold's frustrated betrayal of the American fortress at West Point. The building was razed in 1929.

The subject lived in South Duxbury, Massachusetts.

Mary Anna Sawyer was the daughter of Dr. Micajah Sawyer and Sybil (Farnham) Sawyer of Newburyport, Massachusetts. She was the second wife of Philip Jeremiah Schuyler to whom she was married in 1807, and she was the mother of George Lee Schuyler. This portrait was a gift to the Society from her granddaughters.