Mary Jane Peale was born in New York City, the only daughter of Rubens Peale (1784 1865). She studied painting with her uncle Rembrandt Peale (1778 1860) and with Thomas Sully (1783 1872). She enrolled at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts in 1856 and nearly a decade later studied in Paris and Rome. Mary Jane Peale made many copies of the works of old masters and of her grandfather, Charles Willson Peale (1741 1827) and Rembrandt Peale, and painted still life subjects. The journals that she kept from about 1847 to 1860 a chronology for her mostly undated works, and document that she read Edmund Burke’s Philosophical Enquiry into Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful (1757), Charles William Day’s The Art of Miniature Painting (1856), and John Ruskin’s Stones of Venice (1851).