William Thomas Smedley was born in Chester County, Pennsylvania in 1858 and died in Bronxville, New York in 1920. He studied first in Philadelphia at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts and later entered the Paris studio of Jean Paul Laurens. He submitted paintings regularly at prestigious exhibitions both in America and abroad during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, including the Paris Salon and the Universal Exposition of 1900.

Around the turn of the century the village of Bronxville, located just north of Manhattan, became the center of a small suburban artists' colony. Otto Bacher settled there in 1896 and was followed a year later by Will Hicock Low. Smedley moved to Bronxville in 1898 and was soon joined by his fellow Pennsylvanian Milne Ramsey. Smedley may have chosen one of the many parks developed within the suburban communites just beyond Manhattan as the setting for The White Dress: Portrait of a Young Woman in a Park.