Mr. William Wallace Taylor Jr., of Baltimore

Bust-length portrait of William Wallace Taylor, Jr., facing three-quarters to the right, with brown hair and beard, wearing a black coat, white shirt and black stock.

The subject is the Baltimore dry goods merchant, businessman and banker, who came from a prominent local mercantile family. He graduated from Mount Hope College in 1839. In 1850 he became a director of the Merchant's Bank of Baltimore, as his father had been before him, and in 1861 he became Director of the Union Bank of Maryland. He was also linked with the Baltimore and Ohio Railroad and many other local businesses. In 1847 he married Catharine Augusta Birckhead (see companion piece WAM 38.481), whose family also were strongly connected to the Union Bank of Maryland, her grandfather, Solomon, being one of its incorporators. The family lived in 7 West Mount Vernon Place, making them the neighbours of the Walters family who lived at 5 West. (For more information see "History of Baltimore Maryland, from its founding as a town to the current year, 1792-1898").

Born in Leeds, England, and trained in an architect's office, Richard Morrell Staigg came to the United States in 1831. Washington Allston encouraged him and he soon devoted himself to miniature painting. He was a regular exhibitor at the National Academy of Design, New York City, of which he was elected an associate in 1856, and an academician in 1861. In the last two decades of his life he devoted himself to portraits, landscapes and genre scenes in oil.