Alice Mumford was primarily a portrait painter who began her career at the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts along with fellow student, William Glackens. She was a lifelong friend of the Glackens family, and the wife of Stewart Culin, Curator of Ethnology at the Brooklyn Museum. Alice must have been quite a topic of conversation for Ira Glackens writes "Alice should have been a millionaire, for she would have had the flair. I intend to be the best dressed woman in New York, she announced one day. I have two hundred dollars a year to do it on. Then she added, If I had three hundred dollars, I could do it!

Painted in 1911, the work has descended through the Saint Gaudens family through the marriage of Alice Mumford's daughter Penelope to the sculpture's grandson.