Peale's studies of French Neoclassical painting during a sojourn in Paris (1808–10) helped free him from the eighteenth-century British conventions he had learned from his portraitist father, Charles Willson Peale. In France he examined not only the works of modern artists but also those by Rubens, Van Dyck, and other Baroque masters. The results of this course of study are seen most vividly in his family portraits of the mid-1820s. In these works—among which the present painting is especially successful—Peale adopted a resplendent palette and demonstrated his command of the techniques for capturing warm flesh tones, manipulating light, and emphasizing textures.

For this picture of his youngest children, Michael Angelo (1814–1833) and Emma Clara (1816–1839), he used as a source an 1824 lithograph of a similar composition by the French artist Julien de Villeneuve and translated that image into his own idiom. Peale adapted their compelling likenesses for his captivating picture, eschewing all narrative device. In lieu of employing a background setting and specific iconographic props, as appeared in the print and as his father had recommended, Peale rather subtly and brilliantly articulated his composition through facial expression and pose.