Louis Michel Eilshemius (1864-1941)

Laurel Hill Manor was the Eilshemius family summer home near Newark, New Jersey. With a sixteen-room house on over seventy acres sloping down to the Passaic River, the property was lavishly landscaped with "terrace after terrace, through aisles of trees, the successive landings flanked by stone urns and statuary." (W. Schack, And He Sat Among the Ashes, New York, 1939, p. 21)

Although Louis Michel Eilshemius painted the present work in 1907, the composition was inspired by a photograph of the flower garden from almost forty years earlier, which shows the young artist at five years old with his beloved brother Victor at the top of the stairs. The original 1869 photograph was printed in Eilshemius's self-published poetry book My Brother Victor: A Convalescent's Fancy in 1912.