A painter, William Penn Morgan was born in London in 1826. At age fourteen, he went to Paris and studied in the atelier of Thomas Couture. However, during the early part of his residency he was much more interested in the "sights and sounds of Paris" than in academic studies, but eventually he settled into studying the Old Masters and also studying at the French government school at Le Havre. However, not feeling any great sense of accomplishment and not wanting to return to England as a 'failure', he spent the 1840s as a sailor.

In 1851, he arrived penniless in Brooklyn, New York City, a place he died in 1900 and where he had had remained for most of the rest of his career. Between 1855 and 1860, he intermittently attended the school of the National Academy of Design but later confessed to writer Theodore Dreiser that he had done "very little studying" during that time and wished he had devoted more time to his education. In 1852, he had begun submitting paintings to the annual Academy exhibitions. He became accomplished and earned a distinguished reputation for portrait painting, but today is best known for his domestic genre subjecs, especially women, young girls and and child figures. Upon his death, the minutes of the National Academy described Morgan "as a painter of 'sterling merit' whose treatment of subjects 'reflected the sensitiveness and refinement of his own nature.' "