Born and raised in Newburyport, Massachusetts, Laura Coombs Hills studied art briefly at the Cowles School of Art, Boston, at the Art Students League in New York, and with private instructors in Boston. Despite these studies, she is considered largely to be self-taught. Her earliest works were landscapes, portraits, and florals, all executed in pastel, and sixteen of these were shown at a gallery in Boston in 1889 to considerable acclaim.

A trip to England in 1890 focused her attention on portrait miniatures painted on ivory. Before the nineteenth-century invention of the daguerreotype, portrait miniatures were popular as sentimental keepsakes both in Europe and the United States. Towards the end of the century, however, they had fallen out of favor as photography became more advanced and widely available. Nevertheless, Hills became intrigued by the miniatures and sought to create them herself, thus beginning something of a revival of the medium in America. Among her many accomplishments for her work in miniature, she was awarded a gold medal at the 1904 St. Louis Exposition.

By the 1920s, she began to focus again on her early interest of creating pastels of floral subjects, and it is for this work that she is celebrated most today. The present work is among her largest and most accomplished compositions, showing an abundant bunch of freshly gathered peonies bursting forth. Unlike many of her pastels, she chose not to dilute the subject by including a vase or other flowers in the composition, and instead concentrated on the lushness of the peonies, so lavish in their execution as almost to evoke their delicate perfume.