Logsdail was born and brought up in the Close of Lincoln Cathedral, where his father was verger for fifty years. He studied at the local School of Art under E.R. Taylor (later to make his name at Birmingham) and at Verlat's Academy in Antwerp, where Frank Bramley, also a native of Lincolnshire, was a fellow student. In the autumn of 1880 he went to Venice, working for a time with Sargent, who was currently lodged in the Palazzo Rezzonico together with Boldini. In 1883 he toured the Balkans, Egypt and Palestine, but Venice remained his base even after his marriage in 1892, he and his wife only finally returning to England in 1900. Two children were born in Venice, and the family had an apartment in the Palazzo Contarini near the Church of the Madonna dell'Orto.

The present picture belongs to Logsdail's Venetian period but is harsher in mood than the picturesque Venetian al Fresco of 1885, sold in these Rooms on 5 March 1993, lot 91. It seems to owe something to the social realist movement of the 1870s and perhaps in particular to the example of Luke Fildes, one of the movement's leading exponents, who paid the first of many visits to Venice (where his brother-in-law Henry Woods was already established) in January 1881. Logsdail almost certainly encountered him, possibly through Sargent, with whom Fildes was in touch. If Fildes did bring the taste for social realism to Venice, it is ironical that the city was to have precisely the opposite effect on him, causing him to adopt a more winsome and profitable style in the 1880s.