Charles Willson Peale was an American painter and museum founder who specialized in portraiture, painting over a thousand works in his lifetime.

[1] Yarrow Mamout was a formerly enslaved African financier who lived in Georgetown, Washington, D.C..[2] Soon after he had arrived in Washington D.C. from Philadelphia in November 1818, Peale was first made aware of Yarrow through Peale's nephew Joseph Brewer.

[4] The painting depicts a slouching Yarrow dressed in a greatcoat and a woolen hat with a cheerful expression.

[5] 27 years after Peale had died in 1827, his museum was dissolved and the painting of Yarrow, then misidentified as George Washington's slave William Lee, was sold to Charles S. Ogden for six dollars.

In 1947, historian Charles Coleman Sellers, a descendant of Peale, corrected the identity of the sitter to Yarrow.