With origins in fifteenth-century Bohemia and Moravia (now parts of the Czech Republic), the Moravian church was a pre-Reformation Protestant sect following the teachings of the priest and reformer Jan Hus. The first Moravians arrived in colonial America in Savannah, Georgia, in 1735, but did not establish a settlement. In 1741, Moravians founded Bethlehem in Pennsylvania. Other Pennsylvania settlements developed at Nazareth and Lititz.  

The school known today as the Linden Hall School for Girls had its origin in 1746, reflecting the Moravian belief that stressed early education for both girls and boys. Beginning in 1794, the Lititz Moravian Girls’ School began to accept non-Moravian students. Soon the school established an agent in Baltimore, after which the Baltimore-Washington, D. C., area became an important source of students. The young woman who worked the picture, Eliza Carolina Dagen, was a student from Maryland, enrolling approximately a year after her mother’s death, which she commemorated in the picture.
 
Eliza’s picture features a number of characteristics of the Lititz school: a border with metallic threads and/or spangles, a willow tree with branches fully filled with stitching, a group of hovering putti, and twill-woven silk foundation fabric. This picture retains its original floral and foliate stencil-painted frame.

The painted elements of the picture are attributed to Peter Lehn Grosh. Grosh, a Moravian who advertised as a “Sign, Flag, Masonic Apron, Letter, Fancy, and Portrait Painter,” lived in Mechanicsville, near present-day East Petersburg in Lancaster County, Pennsylvania, approximately eight miles southwest of Lititz. School records indicate that Grosh began doing such work for the school in 1819. Herr’s work suggests that Grosh continued to produce work for the school until about 1829.