Hermanus Marshall, depicted at the age of 21, was the fifth child and second son of Reverend John Rutgers Marshall (1743-1789) and his wife, Sarah Bryan, of Woodbury. He was born April 22, 1776, and subsequently married Abigail Judson of Washington, CT in April of 1804. Marshall died in his seventieth year, December 11, 1845 at Ogdensburgh, New York.

Richard Jennys worked 1766-1799 in Boston, as well as Charleston, South Carolina, as a portrait and miniature painter. The similar style in which Richard and William Jennys painted, waist-length portraits usually set in painted spandrels, shows that the two once worked closely together, perhaps while both were in residence at New Milford, Connecticut.