A painter of literary and historical subjects, genre scenes and portraits, Gertrude Hammond exhibited from 1886 at the Royal Academy, the Royal Society of British Artists and the royal Institute of Painters in Watercolours, of which she was elected a member in 1896. She won a bronze medal at the Exposition Universelle in Paris in 1900. From the turn of the century she was a fairly prolific illustrator of books, including The Faerie Queene, the works of Shakespeare, Pilgrim's Progress, David Copperfield, and a number of historical novels. Examples of her work are in the Royal Shakespeare Gallery, Stratford-upon-Avon, the Shipley Art Gallery, Gateshead, and the Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney.

The present picture, painted when she was twenty-six was the first work she showed at the Royal Institute of Painters in Watercolours (1888). It was perhaps designed to make the masimum impact, and is certainly by far the most impressive work in he Witt Library file. The subject, that of the Wise and Foolish Virgins, is conceived in classical terms. The may have been aware that the theme had been treated by Leighton in an early fresco and by Richmond in a painting exhibited at the Grosvenor Gallery in 1881, but the main stylistic influence is the aesthetic classicism of the later Leighton and Albert Moore. Indeed the artist went out of her way to emphasize the aesthetic nature of the work by calling it Decorative Panel and by devising a frame which makes a decorative ensembel with the pcitre itself, the reeded outer section may owe something to the frames favoured by the arch-aesthete, Whistler