While working in Annapolis, Maryland, between 1769 and 1775, the artist Charles Willson Peale acquired a mixed-race, enslaved couple named Lucy and Scarborough Williams. It is believed they came to him as payment for a portrait commissioned by a plantation owner in the area. While enslaved by Peale, they gave birth to Moses in 1777. Peale later freed the parents, but the current law allowed children born into slavery to be kept in servitude until the age of twenty-eight. Only nine years old at the time, Moses, like many enslaved children, was forced to live with another family besides his own. Williams grew up in the Peale household, and Peale trained Moses to operate the recently invented physiognotrace. This device created silhouettes by tracing the outline of the sitter’s head directly onto a sheet of white paper.

The Peale Museum was a public museum of paintings and natural history located in Philadelphia. There, Williams, as a free black man, sold his portraits in a gallery. The paper-cutting stand quickly became a popular attraction. With the earnings, Moses Williams purchased a two-story brick house in Philadelphia, where he lived with his wife, the Peales’ white cook. Moses made this silhouette of George Washington after 1803. Peale freed Moses at the age of twenty-seven, about a year after this silhouette was cut.