Thomas Eakins painted this model while studying with the artist Jean-Leon Gerome at the Ecole des Beaux-Arts in Paris. Although the model in this work has not been identified, she is depicted on the canvases of several other artists who were working in the French capital contemporaneously. For example, she also appears in Frederic Bazille's Young Woman with Peonies, where she is portrayed as an independent flower vendor, wearing the same coral earring and madras headscarf featured in Eakins's study. Headscarves were symbolic within Black communities at the time — a colorful version with distinctive knots could denote a woman's freedom. Conversely, a madras cloth tied tightly to a wearer's head, as shown in Eakins's work, suggests a lower social level.