Like her numerous cousins, aunts and uncles, Mary Jane Peale continued the family tradition by pursuing a career as an artist. The only daughter of Rubens Peale (1784-1865), she aspired to be a portrait painter and studied with her uncle Rembrandt and Thomas Sully. In 1855 she took up residence with her family at Woodland Farm near Schuylkill Haven to care for her parents. There at Woodland Farm, in a reversal of tradition, Mary Jane inspired her father, Rubens, to paint.

After her mother's death in 1864, Mary Jane and her father moved to Philadelphia where the two devoted their time to still life painting, often working on each other's paintings. A year later Rubens died, and Mary Jane travelled to Europe and is known to have studied in Paris in the late 1860s. Back in Philadelphia for the remainder of her life, the artist attended the life class for women at the Pennsylvannia Academy of Fine Arts and carried the Peale still life tradition into the twentieth century.

Mary Jane completed many of Rubens' unfinished works and continued to practice portraiture. The artist is considered at her best in her intricate studies of flowers and fruit, such as Still Life with Apples, Grapes, Figs and Plums.