Sir John Everett Millais was a founding member of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood, a self-titled group of British artists who broke from the 19th-century art establishment and instead drew inspiration from art predating the Renaissance. In their work, they emphasized purity of form and direct observation of nature. Much of Millais’s later work, including this etching, departed from the ideas of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood and dealt with the themes of domesticity and family life that were popular with Victorian audiences.