Upon his 1866 discharge from the U.S. Navy, Alexander Charles Stuart became a boat portraitist to the various shipbuilding companies along the Delaware River. Wilmington landscape artist, collector, and philanthropist Henry Lea Tatnall (1829–1885) befriended Stuart, and Stuart met many accomplished painters as a result. One of Tatnall’s friends, William Michael Harnett (1848–1892), may have introduced Stuart to trompe l’oeil painting like this, in which the subject seems to exist in three dimensions.