Maurice Felton arrived in Sydney in 1839 with his wife and four children. He came as a naval surgeon but quickly established himself as a highly regarded portrait painter, creating sophisticated likenesses of major Sydney families before his death less than three years after his arrival in the colony, aged 40 years.

When this fine oil portrait of Lieutenant John James Peters, Quartermaster of the 28th Regiment, came into the possession of Goulburn solicitor PJ Meyer, he considered it to be of great historic interest. He offered it to the Mitchell Library in 1922. The work was said to be in an excellent state of preservation, with the scarlet of the uniform and the gold lace epaulettes ‘almost as vivid as when newly painted’.