Sarah Miriam Peale was a highly skilled woman artist in the early nineteenth century who painted primarily in Baltimore and St. Louis. Trained by her father, James Peale and her uncle, Charles Willson Peale, Sarah, or “Sally” as her family called her, honed her talent by painting portraits, still lifes, and miniatures.

After her election as a member of the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts in 1824, she became the most sought after portrait artist in Baltimore and painted more than “one-hundred of its leading citizens in a style that was regarded as skillfully realistic. Her subjects looked dignified, pleasant, and capable…”

Peale’s detailed manner of painting fabric, as instructed by her father and uncle, can be seen in Portrait of Sarah Anne Walter Deming, 1824.The three-quarter pose of this elegantly dressed woman directly relates to Peale’s compositional style using soft contours of light and shade to portray the dignified quietude of the sitter, Sarah Anne Walter Deming.