Hardy was one of the leading members of the Cranbrook Colony, the group of artists who gathered round Thomas Webster when he settled at this small town sixteen miles south-east of Tunbridge Wells in the mid 1850s. From this date on he tended to work to a certain formula, painting genre subjects (like all the Cranbrook artists), with an emphasis on childhood themes, in box-like interiors placed parallel to the picture plane. The present picture, however, was painted before he settled into this mould, and is a good deal more adventurous than his familiar later work, from which it differs in subject matter, the dramatic use of light, the comparatively bold handling of paint, and the emphasis on diagonals in the composition. Few examples of this early style are known, but another picture of 1854, Expectation: Interior of a Cottage with a Mother and Children, is in the collection at Royal Holloway College (1982 cat., no.26, repr.).