Mary Jane Simes and her Brother Edgar C. Simes

Grandchildren of the artist, Mary Jane Simes (1807-1872) and Edgar C. Simes (1810-1867) were the children of Dr. Samuel Simes (1781-1813) and Jane Ramsay Peale (1785-1842). Like many in her illustrious artistic family, Mary Jane was a miniature painter and worked and exhibited in Philadelphia and Baltimore between 1825 and 1835 prior to her marriage to John Llyod Yeates (1802-1875). Both sitters were painted previously by James Peale as smaller children with their parents. Mary Jane is depicted with their father, and Edgar with their mother. These works descended to Mary Jane’s granddaughter Mary Donaldson Dallam, Mrs. Walter Scott Allen (1875-1954), and were sold at Christie’s on 1 June 1984.

The present work was previously owned by Horace Wells Sellers (1857-1933), father of Peale scholar Charles Coleman Sellers (1903-1980) and a great-grandson of Charles Willson Peale (1741-1827), making him a second cousin once removed of the sitters. As the portrait was said to have been acquired by Sellers from a Peale family descendant in Baltimore, it likely passed through one of the two sitters to their children or grandchildren who were living in Baltimore in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The portrait was subsequently owned by Horace’s daughter, Jessie (Sellers) Walton and her son, John G. Walton, before consigned to auction in 1990.