William Worcester Churchill was born in 1858 in the Boston suburb of Jamaica Plain. He entered the Museum School of the Museum of Fine Arts in 1877 and later studied in Paris with Bonnat. He returned to Boston and by 1885 established a reputation as an accomplished portrait painter. The Museum of Fine Arts acquired his work Leisure in 1912. Like many painters of the Boston School, Churchill specialized in portraits of women. With its refined sensibility similar to that of the work of William McGregor Paxton, The Nosegay of Violets: Portrait of a Woman typifies early twentieth-century painting of the Boston School.