Edward Everett was a clergyman, educator and statesman who served in the U.S. House of Representatives (1825-35) and as the governor of Massachusetts (1836-39). After serving four years as U.S. minister to Great Britain, he returned to Harvard, his alma mater, as president of the college (1846-49). Everett was a celebrated orator; one of his best-known speeches was delivered just prior to Lincoln's Gettysburg Address.

A replica of this painting is in the Abbey Aldrich Rockefeller Folk Art Collection, Williamsburg, Virginia.

The subject was born in Westchester, New York, the fourth of eleven sons of Wynant Van Zandt III and Maria Allaire (Underhill) Van Zandt (1766-1851) of New York. He lived with his wife, née Louisa Julia Underhill, daughter of Townsend Underhill, and their fourteen children in Paris, France.

This portrait was a gift to the Society from the subject's granddaughter.

The nurse would have been an emancipated worker, since slavery had by this time been abolished in New York. The baby's outfit appears to be a christening dress and the open window in the background is a traditional symbol of hope. Whittredge was primarily a landscape painter and his genre scenes often included through-the-window landscapes. The setting for this painting is believed to be the Louisa Nevins residence in Riverside, N.Y.

De Witt Clinton served four terms as governor of New York State (1817-22 and 1825-28). In addition, he was president of the American Academy of Art and third president of The New-York Historical Society (1817-19). George Catlin, who began his career as a miniaturist in Philadelphia around 1820, painted portraits in New York State before leaving on the first of his trips into the West where he painted Native American subjects that were to become the basis of his fame.