Mills became associated with Engine Company No. 13 of the New York Volunteer Fire Department at the age of thirteen. In 1835 he became foreman of the company and in 1838 assistant engineer. His company was responsible for halting the great fire of 1835 at Wall Street, thus preventing destruction of the northern part of the city. He was president of the Exempt Firemen's Association, a company of veterans reserved for emergencies, which he helped organize in 1854. This portrait belongs to the early career of Francis Bicknell Carpenter, who had come to New York in 1852 from his native Homer, New York. He remained in the city for several years, painting portraits and genre pieces, before moving in 1860 to Washington, DC., where he spend six months in the White House while painting his portrait of Lincoln. The portrait of Mills ranks among the artist's finest; the head, especially, possesses a fine feeling for form, animation, and character. Mills holds a copy of the constitution of the Fire Department of the City of New York. On the table beside him are writing instruments, account books, and a replica of the bust of Washington by Houdon.

The subject, the son of John Hermans Knickerbacker (1723-1803), was a member of the New York state legislature from Schaghticoke, Rensselaer County, New York, and the owner of an extensive estate. This portrait, a gift to the Society from his grandson, may be a copy of a portrait of the subject by the French artist Pierre Paul Prud'hon (1758-1823) at the Musée Carnavalet in Paris. The identification of the subject is based on family tradition.

Marie Madeleine Pioche de La Vergne was a novelist and a hostess of fashionable salons in Paris. "La Princesse de Clèves" (1678) was her most important book. She married François Motier, an ancestor of General Lafayette, in 1655.

Conceived in the early 1770s, Charles Willson Peale's (1741-1827) depiction of his family was the most ambitious portrait undertaken by a colonial American artist up to that time. As a tour de force of artistic conception and technique, it went far to establish Peale as a master portraitist. The warmth of family ties that one finds in the letters and diaries of the Peale family is very much in evidence in the portrait. The theme of love and friendship is underscored by the subject of the painting on the easel at the left, which depicts three maidens signifying the "Concordia Animae" or "agreement of the spirits." The artist appears at left, holding his palette and supervising the drawing made by his brothers, St. George and James. Seated in the middle of the scene is Rachel Brewer Peale, the artist's first wife, and their daughter, Margaret. To the right sit the artist's mother, Margaret, his sister, Elizabeth, and his daughter, Eleanor. Standing behind the table are the artist's sister, Margaret Jane and the Peales' family nurse, Peggy Durgan, while the artist's dog Argus, sits in front of the table. The three portrait busts depict Peale's teacher, Benjamin West, Peale, and one of Peale's earliest patrons, the Virginia-born lawyer Edmund Jennings. The table contains a fine still life, bearing an apple peal, intended as a pun on the artist's name, and the artist seldom surpassed his rendering of fabrics in this picture. The family portrait remained in Peale's possession throughout his life. Some thirty-five years after commencing the picture and after he had essentially retired from painting to devote time to his museum, Peale made certain changes to bring it to a satisfactory conclusion. He repainted parts of the background, parts of his own likeness, and included the profile of his beloved dog, Argus. By 1813 the portrait was installed in the Peale Museum where it remained until it was purchased in 1854 by Thomas Jefferson Bryan, who donated the painting, along with his entire art collection to the New-York Historical Society in 1867.

Elizabeth De Peyster, who in 1791 became the second wife of Charles Willson Peale, was the daughter of William De Peyster and grew up in New York. Her portrait remained in the family until 1931 when Franklin Peale Patterson gave it to the Musical Fund Society of Philadelphia, from which The New-York Historical Society acquired it in 1957.

Milledoler was born in Rhinebeck, New York, the son of John Muhlithaler, a Swiss immigrant, and Anna (Mitchell) Muhlithaler. He graduated from Columbia College in 1793 and became pastor of the Nassau Street German Reformed Church in New York by the time he was twenty. In 1813 he became pastor of the Collegiate Dutch Reformed Church in New York and he remained associated with that denomination for the rest of his life. He was appointed president of Rutgers College in 1825.

The subject was a merchant in New York; he maintained a shop on Broadway where he dealt in gentlemen's furnishings and shawls. For some years his home was at 248 West 39th Street; in the 1870s he moved to New Jersey.

The subject was the son of Samuel and Abby Merry and was born in Scituate, Rhode Island. With his brother, he established a dyeing and bleaching firm at Pawtucket, R.I., of which he eventually became sole proprietor. An active Mason, he rose to the rank of Grand Master of the state of Rhode Island. His portrait was a gift to the Society from his great-grandson.

Ellen Marie Boleyn, the daughter of William Henry Boleyn of London, was born at Exmouth, Devonshire, England. She married Brewster Maverick of New York on April 9, 1855.

The subject was the son of Samuel Maverick and Clara (Reynolds) Maverick. Like his father before him he became an engraver, but after 1856 he added lithography to his skills. In 1866 he entered into partnership with Louis Stephan, and in 1878 with J. G. Wissinger. The lithographic firm of Maverick and Wissinger survived into the first half of the twentieth century.