Described by Virginia Surtees as 'a laundry girl of uncertain virtue', Ellen Smith was a popular model in the 1860s, sitting not only to Boyce but Rossetti, Burne-Jones, Simeon Solomon, Poynter, Pinwell and W.J. Linton. Perhaps her most famous appearance is as the bridesmaid in the left foreground of Rossetti's The Beloved, 1865-6 (Tate Gallery). Boyce owned several of Rossetti's studies of her and in addition to the present picture painted her in two watercolours of 1866-7 (George Price Boyce, exh. Tate Gallery, 1987, nos. 5-6, repr. in cat.). She also appears many times in his diaries. In May 1868 he gave her an alpaca dress, 'thinking it might be useful', and the following year he lent her #15 when she was trying to acquire a laundry business in Keppel Street (now Sloane Avenue). She was still sitting for him in November 1870, but it was perhaps shortly after this that she lost her good looks in unfortunate circumstances. According to Rossetti's assistant, Henry Treffry Dunn, 'Ellen Smith sat for several of his sweetest pictures until the poor girl got her face sadly cut about and disfigured by a brute of a soldier and then of course she was of no more use as a model' (Recollections of Dante Gabriel Rossetti, 1984, p.32). She makes her last appearance in Boyce's diary on 17 February 1873: 'Ellen Smith, now Mrs Elson, called on me to tell me she had been married about 3 weeks ago to an old acquaintance and suitor, a cabman. She wishes to do some laundry work on her own account, as her husband's earnings are small'.

The present study is unusual in Boyce's work in being an oil. Only one other oil by Boyce is known today, a landscape in the Tate Gallery dated 1857, although two more are known to have been exhibited at the Royal Academy in 1858.