Born at Arburn, New York, of Irish parents, Shannon came to London at the age of sixteen and studied under Poynter at South Kensington. In 1880 he won the Gold Medal for figure painting, and the following year he showed the first of many works at the Royal Academy. He was not, however, exclusively wedded to the RA. He exhibited at both the Grosvenor and New Galleries. His work was admired by Whistler (perhaps partly because they were fellow-Americans), and this led him to show with the Royal Society of British Artists and the International Society, of which Whistler was respectively President and Chairman. He was also a founder member of the New English Art Club (1886). His reputation was established by the turn of the century, a one-man exhibition at the Fine Art Society in 1896 being followed by his election as ARA in 1897 and the purchase of a picture, The Flower Girl, for the Chantrey Bequest in 1901. He became a full Academician in 1909 and was elected President of the Royal Society of Portrait Painters the following year. He was knighted in 1922, a year before his death.

From the outset Shannon's talents were devoted to society portraits, his first RA exhibit being a portrait of one of the Queen's ladies-in-waiting, the Hon. Horatia Stopford, shown by command of the Queen. His early portraits are in a bold square-brush technique learnt from H.H. La Thangue, but in 1890s he developed a fluid touch highly flattering to his sitters. Indeed George Moore complained that 'through Mr Shannon our duchesses realise all their aspirations, present and posthumous', and in 1892 two of his portraits were rejected by the NEAC, causing him to resign. Many saw him as a rival to Sargent, and, like Sargent, he was much influenced by Gainsborough and Reynolds. Some of his best portraits resulted from his close association with the Duke of Rutland and his family. The beautiful and talented Violet, Duchess of Rutland, sat to him many times, not only for formal portraits but in such roles as the Madonna or 'an Art Nouveau priestess in a Mucha-style head-dress' (Jane Abdy and Charlotte Gere, The Souls, 1984, p.46). He also painted numerous likenesses of her good-looking children, notably the Ladies Marjorie and Diana Manners, later Marchioness of Anglesey and Lady Diana Cooper. In her memoirs Lady Diana recalled being painted at the age of eight: 'the huge studio in Holland Park, Shannon himself, whom everyone loved, darting backwards and forwards with palette and mahlstick, delicious smells of paint and turps, (and) a mirror behind the painter in which I could watch the picture grow' (The Rainbow Comes and Goes, 1958, p.54).

Sir John Dickson-Poynder, whose wife and daughter are the subject of the present picture, appears in the Dictionary of National Biography. Born John Dickson in 1866, the son of a Rear-Admiral, he succeeded one uncle as 6th Baronet in 1884, and three years later inherited a fortune from another, Thomas Poynder, whose surname he assumed. In 1892 he entered Parliament as Conservative member for Chippenham, a seat he was to hold for eighteen years. During this period he served in the Boer War as aide-de-camp to Lord Methuen and sat on the LCC where he promoted liberal reforms in education and housing. In 1910 he was appointed Governor of New Zealand and raised to the peerage as Lord Islington. In 1912 he resigned to become chairman of the Royal Commission on the public services in India, and he subsequently served as Under-Secretary of State for the Colonies (1914-15), Under-Secretary of State for India (1915-18) and Chairman of the National Savings Committee (1920-26). His most notable achievement in the Lords was to defeat Balfour's motion accepting a British mandate in Palestine in 1922. In 1896 he married Ann Beauclerk, third daughter of Henry Dundas of Glenesk, Midlothian, and grand-daughter of Robert Cornelis Napier, 1st Baron Napier of Magdala (1810-1890), whose brilliant military career in India included a key role in the relief of Lucknow during the Mutiny. The Dickson-Poynders had only one child, a daughter, so the title lapsed after Lord Islington's death in 1936. She was Joan Alice Katherine, who was born in 1897 and was to marry Lieut.-Col. Sir Edward Grigg of the Grenadier Guards in 1923. The family's country seat was Hartham Park, near Chippenham in Wiltshire, the grounds of which are hinted at in our picture.

Shannon specialised in portraits of mothers (or occasionally fathers) with their children, another example being The Marchioness of Salisbury and Lord David Cecil (Hatfield), exhibited at the RA in 1908. Mrs Dickson-Poynder and her Daughter probably owes something to Reynolds's famous portrait of Nellie O'Brien in the Wallace Collection; a link is provided by another Shannon portrait, Mrs Henry Barber (RA 1912; photo in Witt Library), which is both comparable to our picture in conception and clearly dependent on the Reynolds, showing the sitter seated with a small dog on her lap and wearing (like Lady Dickson-Poynder) a large picture hat. The Wallace Collection was opened to the public in June 1900, and no doubt its magnificent array of English eighteenth-century portraits was a major influence on Shannon.
When exhibited at the Royal Academy in 1905 the picture faced heavy competition, the society portraits shown that year including Sargent's Marlborough Family, Luke Fildes' state portrait of Queen Alexandra, and Dicksee's Lady Hillingdon. Nonetheless it was noticed by the Art Journal and at greater length by The Times. Having complained that some of Shannon's contributions (four in all that year) 'lose a good deal by that tempestuous handling which this painter, who used to be remarkable for grace above every other quality, is now too much affecting', the paper's critic continued: 'Happily this does not apply to the admirable picture of "Lady Dickson-Poynder and her Daughter Joan", which is no attempt at a tour de force, but just a simple, artistic, and therefore satisfactory portrait of a lady and child.'