This scene depicts Manhattan’s Central Park on May Day. In the late nineteenth century, after a series of protests by workers, this ancient European celebration of spring was reimagined as International Workers’ Day, promoting the rights of laborers worldwide. In 1903, a New York World reporter described the fashions associated with the holiday, writing that the “grass was so strewn with white frocks that . . . it looked as if household linen laid out to bleach had suddenly taken to skipping about.”