Solomon Sturges was a successful grain merchant in Chicago. During the Civil War, he organized and financed a large group of Union volunteers called the Sturges Rifles. The sitter’s son, Benjamin Sturges, commissioned this portrait in 1862. As Solomon Sturges was unable to travel to Italy, Hiram Powers worked from photographs and measurements provided by the son. Unfortunately, crossing the Atlantic from Florence to the United States was complicated by the war, and the marble sculpture reached America only a week before Sturges’s death.