Mary Clinton Brown was the daughter of Thomas Ellis Brown and Adeline Hamilton (Clinton) Brown. A resident of New York, she lived as 1235 Park Avenue at the time of her death.

A native of Prince Edward Island, Canada, the subject came to New York at the age of sixteen, attended New York University Law School, and established his law practive in New York. He was long a member of the New York Caledonian Club and was its chief in 1890, 1893, and 1894. In this portrait he is dressed as a Scottish highlander, and stands in a landscape setting with a thistle prominently in the background.

This panel was once part of a "cassone," a chest usually made as one of a pair for a wedding. It was on the sides of these chests that secular narrative painting first appeared in fifteenth-century Florence. This work was first attributed to Dello Delli (c. 1404-1469) in 1811 by the collector and scholar Alexis François de Artaud de Montor, and purchased by Thomas Jefferson Bryan in 1851 from the sale of his collection in Paris. The panel was considered to be by Dello until 1915, after which it was attributed to several different anonymous masters. Today it is thought to be by Giovanni di Ser Giovanni, called Lo Scheggia, the younger brother of Massacio (1401-1428?), and artists in his shop. The painting represents a Roman celebratory pageant or parade, called a triumph, after one of Caesar's successful military campaigns. The artist was influenced more by contemporary triumphs than by historical descriptions. Julius Caesar rides on the triumphal car at the left. Many of the remaining figures wear contemporary clothing. The lavish procession is depicted entering through the gates of Rome at the right with its war booty. The elaborately tooled and gilded surfaces are left over from the International Gothic style and add to the decorative effect. It was also once decorated with silver, which has disappeared leaving the adhesive red bole visible.

Swabey, an Englishman and a fellow of the College of Advocates, was an associate of John Trumbull in London when the artist was there negotiating the Jay Treaty with Great Britain.

About 1808, when this portrait was painted, Bass Otis and Jarvis had a partnership of sorts in New York. Otis painted the likeness of Jarvis for the Peale Museum, from which it was purchased by P. T. Barnum. The portrait was acquired by James M. Falconer of New York in 1863.

Ellen Stebbins Curtiss was the only child of Levi Guernsey Curtiss and Helen (Couch) Curtiss. She married Daniel Willis James in 1854.