Description: "The Flower Girl" is a highly unusual subject for Ingham, an artist who rarely strayed from portraiture. He may have painted it as a speculative work, or on commission from Jonathan Sturges, who owned the work by the time it appeared on exhibition in the spring of 1847 at the National Academy of Design. Images of street vendors were popular in American and European painting at the time, but more often the subjects were enterprising boys rather than girls