Leah Nathan and her twin sister Rachel were the first of five daughters born to Lyon Nathan and his wife Caroline Webb. Lyon was an immigrant from Germany who had been naturalized in Reading, Pennsylvania in 1763. From 1770, when Leah and Rachel were 10, their father served as shammas of Congregation Mikveh Israel in Philadelphia. His duties were described as follows: “to keep shull [synagogue] and everything belonging in it clean and in good order, he is to make all the candles—light them when they are wanted, and see them properly set out. He is to attend whenever there is prayers, and see the shull secured afterwards… He is to see the lamp is kept constantly burning. He is to attend all circumcisions, wedding and funerals, which are according to our religion, and no others.” He was later elected to this post under the congregation’s new Constitution in 1782. Thus, the twins were raised in a religious atmosphere, at the very center of the Jewish community.

On November 4, 1778, Leah and Rachel– then just 18 — celebrated a double wedding—Leah to the Baltimore merchant Jacob Hart. and Rachel to the physician Isaac Abrahams. Leah and her new husband divided their time between Philadelphia, where their first two children were born, and Baltimore, where their son David arrived in July 1785, but later settled in New York. Among their thirteen children were seven sons and six daughters, including them Rebecca, Nathan and daughter Zipporah, who became the grandmother of poet Emma Lazarus. Leah lived to the ripe old age of ninety-three, dying thirty-five years after this portrait was painted.