Sarah Miriam Peale was among the earliest, fully professional, self-supporting women artists in the United States. The youngest of five daughters of James Peale (1741-1827) and his wife, Mary Claypoole Peale (1753-1829), three of whom were active as artists, she was as ambitious and dedicated to art as her successful elder sister, miniature painter Anna Claypoole Peale (1791-1878). In 1817, she first exhibited at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, an institution her uncle, noted artist Charles Willson Peale (1741-1827), had been instrumental in founding in 1805. By 1824, S. Peale and her sister, A. Peale, were the first women elected to become Academicians of the Academy. S. Peale’s long, productive, and successful career unfolded in Philadelphia, Baltimore, Washington, D.C., and St. Louis.
By 1818, S. Peale’s cousin, portraitist and history painter, Rembrandt Peale (1778–1860) was supporting her desire to excel in oil portraiture through periodic instruction, client referrals and a studio in his Baltimore Museum. By 1823 she had left Philadelphia to seek work in Baltimore and Washington, D.C., where her personal blend of good likenesses, rendered through carefully modelled features and embedded in bold and colourful compositions, found favour with the affluent, professional, mercantile and political elite of those cities. At their best, her portraits are luminous and highly finished. Her detailed depictions of fashionable contemporary clothing and jewellery often added a highly decorative element to her portraiture. But to accommodate her clients, she also rendered more subdued images.

During her twenty-two years in Baltimore, Maryland, she successfully competed against well-known male competitors and painted General La Fayette from life in Washington, D.C., during his celebratory tour of the United States in 1824. Trips to Washington in 1841–3 yielded portraits of notable senators, congressmen, various officials and visiting dignitaries. At the invitation of friends, she relocated to St. Louis, Missouri, in 1847, where she remained for thirty years. As she continued her portrait practice during the 1850s she increasingly turned to still life pictures of fruit and flowers, which proved to be popular.

S. Peale’s still life pictures are small in scale like those of her gifted cousin, still life painter Raphaelle Peale (1774–1825), and she often borrowed motifs from his work, as well as motifs from her father’s pictures, adapting them to her own compositions. Along with Raphaelle, S. Peale’s father, James, is the acknowledged founder of the American still life tradition, but S. Peale’s work differs significantly from James’s larger, more compositionally complex pictures. She also created her own compositions that featured the local fruit and vegetables of the Midwest. The simplicity and decorative organisation of these works have proved appealing to contemporary collectors.

In July 1878 S. Peale returned to Philadelphia to live with her then widowed sister, A. Peale, who had become seriously ill, and her sister, Margaretta (1795–1882), who was also an artist and unmarried. A. Peale died a few months later.