George Seeley was an active, if somewhat isolated, member of the Photo-Secession, the circle of Pictorialist photographers around Alfred Stieglitz at the turn of the 20th century. He lived with his family in the Berkshires and sent softly rendered photographs of willowy maidens in white to Stieglitz for exhibition and for reproduction in the journal Camera Work. A student of Greek and Roman history, Seeley cajoled his mother into sewing vaguely classical costumes for his tableaux, posed friends and family, and often christened his compositions with titles evocative of literary and historical themes.

Characteristically, he rendered the scene here in soft focus so as to meld his subjects with the hazy landscape, conveying a bond of sympathy between man and nature and demonstrating that photographs could be as expressive as drawing and painting, not merely mechanical records of the visible world.