Born in Oxford, the son of the organist at New College, Campbell Taylor attended the Ruskin School before proceeding to the St John's Wood Art School and the Royal Academy Schools, which he entered in 1905. He had begun to exhibit at the RA in 1899, and was to show there regularly until his death seventy years later. Specialising in genre scenes, interiors and portraits, he developed a style which owed a marked debt to Vermeer, but the present picture, which was exhibited at the RA in 1902, three years before he entered the Academy Schools, belongs to a group of early works which betray a very different influence, that of oriental art. Henry Blackburn described it in his Academy Notes as representing 'a Japanese party', while another picture exhibited the same year, The Rivals (no.559), showed 'two Japanese warriors fighting in a forest about a woman.' For a discussion of Taylor's early paintings in this oriental mode, see Herbert Furst, Leonard Campbell Taylor, RA: His Place in Art, 1945, pp.50, 55.