It is a portrait of Peale's younger brother, Rubens, who helped run the family museums and raised plants and animals.

He has an unstudied posture, and he is accompanied by a geranium (possibly Pelargonium inquinans)[1] in a terracotta pot, which takes up so much space in the composition as to compete for attention with the ostensible subject, Rubens.

This is a departure from traditional European portraiture, and valued for its "embodiment of an ideal in American art that favors candor over pretension, clarity over complexity, and the natural over the conventional".

[2] The National Gallery suggests that the work is almost a double portrait of Rubens and the geranium, which may be the first specimen of the plant grown in the US.

[7] This set a record for an American work of art sold at auction, replacing Frederic Edwin Church's The Icebergs ($2.5 million).