This picture was exhibited in 1834, when Poole was painting scenes of ‘rustic life as the traveller often meets with it among some of the waste places in Wales or Ireland’ (Art Union, 1848), much in the manner of Mulready. This picture of rustic purity is much more finely painted than Poole’s later essays in the same genre. It was described in great detail and reviewed by the Worcester Herald: ‘There is no room to charge the artist with slovenly execution or neglect ... The artist has finished the sky, the stony bank, and every part of the landscape, with as much care as the face and person of the girl, and with nearly as smooth a surface’. After his death, The Portfolio of 1884 summed up Poole’s capabilities: ‘he produced slowly and deliberately ... he strove for intellectual or emotional expression rather than the imitation of the appearance of things; subject was a motive and an incentive to his artistic energy, an important factor in his art, which leant to the dramatic and romantic’.