Jean-Baptiste Greuze (1725-1805) enjoyed early succes at the Salon of 1855 with his painting A Father Reading the Bible to his Children (Louvre, Paris), and subsequently his sentimental genre scenes earned him huge acclaim. His desire to be accepted as a history painter at the Académie Royale was thwarted when his submission, Septimius Severus Reproaching Caracalla (1769, Louvre), only earned him membership as a lowly genre painter. Diderot judged that his work was in effect 'morality in paint', while others saw only excessive melodrama or cloying sentimentality. His many portraits of pubescent girls are sometimes represented within a context of barely-concealed sexual allusion. The trend towards Neoclassicism meant that Greuze's work became unfashionable, and after the Revolution of 1789 he was to a great extent forgotten, until a resurgence of interest in his work in the nineteenth century.

There are versions of this composition at the Musée Condé, Chantilly, and in the Musée Pushkin, Moscow. Further copies with variations can be found in the Musée Cognacq-Jay, Musée de Narbonne, Musée des Beaux-Arts de Gand, and in the Bowes Museum, County Durham. This version would appear to be an autograph variant of this popular image.