Jacob Eichholtz, a Pennsylvania portrait painter, made few landscape or marine paintings. This scene, a copy of the work of the Philadelphia marine painter Thomas Birch, made when both artists were over fifty, seems to have been undertaken as a learning experience, or for the pleasure of owning an admired work.

Copies were common in American art before the mid-nineteenth century. Artists learned from copying prints or other paintings, and often earned money making replicas of old master paintings for collectors.