A drawing form the 1870s. Fildes had made his name at the Academy some ten years before with his Applicants for Admission to a Casual Ward..., a harrowing scene of Victorian poverty and distress from Dickens, which proved so popular that it had had to have a rail put around it and a policeman to control the crowds. Fildes's career seemed launched upon scenes from everyday Victorian life, and indeed in 1883 he followed up with The Village Wedding, that became famous all over the Empire after Agnew bought the picture for the vast sum of 2,500 guineas, and published an engraving of it. 

In the meantime, however, Fildes had been spending more and more time in Venice. There he met Whistler, and Sargent who arrived later from Paris. The British contingent of artists working there were unimpressed with the Americans at first (one of the Brits, Henry Woods, commented '...one Sargent doesn't make a battalion any more than one Whistler makes an orchestra'), but Fildes spent some time with Sargent, visiting his studio, and became impressed with his 'impressionist' style. Fildes's two Venetian paintings of 1884 mark a dramatic change not only of subject, but also of treatment, attributable directly to his new influences. As his son put it it in the artist's biography, 'he had abandoned himself to a new method, an experiment in pure colour and technique.'