This painting was commissioned by Franklin Sidway, a businessman and banker from Buffalo, New York. The figures of the children at the center of the composition are posthumous portraits of his two younger siblings. The girl, Parnell Sidway, died at the age of thirteen in 1849 - sixteen years before this painting was completed - and the boy, James Henry Sidway, died at the age of twenty-five battling a hotel fire only months prior to the painting being commissioned. The likenesses for both children were taken from very early daguerreotypes that had been kept in the family. At this period there was ever increasing tension between the fields of portrait painting and photography; was the former headed for obsolescence, was the latter an art or merely technology. And it was certainly considered bad form for an artist to use a photographic image as a reference for a portrait likeness. But in this case there was no other option. And I find it so interesting that Le Clear faced the situation head on; he unapologetically places the children in the artist's painting studio - surrounded by paintings, sculptures, and casts; all the attributes, the landmarks of the painter's atelier - where they pose stiffly - as they would have needed to do to accommodate the long exposures necessary - for the daguerreotypist. I find this most odd portrait equal parts charming, poignant, and audacious. A sweet detail is the boy's hand clutching his sister's skirts. The inclusion of the dog here can be seen as a challenge to the limitations of photography as it was then; a dog could never be expected to hold any sort of a pose, much less to respect the immobility required for early photography's long exposures. (http://godsandfoolishgrandeur.blogspot.nl/2016/11/painting-confronts-photography-1865.html)