The son of the Scottish portrait painter Norman Macbeth, Robert Walker Macbeth trained in London and worked, like so many up-and-coming young artists in the 1870s, on the Graphic. He evolved a heroic-pastoral style owing much to George Heming Mason and Fred Walker, which led James Caw, the historian of Scottish painting, to compare his work to the novels of Thomas Hardy. Many of his subjects were found in Somerset or Lincolnshire. He exhibited at the Royal Academy from 1871 (ARA 1883; RA 1903), but also supported the Grosvenor and New Galleries and, as an accomplished watercolourist, the Old Watercolour Society.

The present example was exhibited at the RA in 1877, and much admired by the critics. The Art Journal had 'emphatic praise' for it, and F.G. Stephens wrote in the Athenaeum: 'The spirit and variety of Mr R.W. Macbeth's Potato Harvest in the Fens are unquestionable; ... it has a good design, expressed compactly and ably in a first-rate composition, and wants but something of chiaroscuro, of colour, and light and shade to gain immensely as a picture. The style is vigorous, the painting strong.' Henry Blackburn was also complimentary in his Academy Notes. He thought it 'a fitting pendant to A Lincolnshire Gang, exhibited last year. Women and children at work is the subject again; the time is late afternoon, and the baskets are being filled with the potatoes ploughed up in the furrows. There is a windy sky and a rain cloud, not indicated in the sketch. The aim is elevated, and the treatment classical.'

A comparable work, Coming from St Ives Market, exhibited at the Grosvenor Gallery in 1878, was sold in these Rooms on 8 February 1991, lot 173.