Hannah Owen Jarvis (née Peters) with her daughters Maria Lavinia and Augusta Honoria Jarvis

Hannah Peters (1763–1845) was the daughter of Loyalists who fled to England during the American Revolution. She and William Jarvis, also a Loyalist, married in 1785, residing with her parents in Pimlico near London. The size of this portrait and its pendant suggest status if not wealth. Painted by an American artist working in Loyalist circles, the portraits of Hannah and William and their children were perhaps intended to mark a hopeful chapter in the Jarvis family’s imminent new life in Upper Canada.