The robust young fisherwoman is far removed from Homer’s earlier female subjects, the sweet and dainty young ladies who played croquet and backgammon in the New England sunlight. In much of Homer’s art from Tynemouth the themes are of a masculine sort—physical labor, danger, the violence of nature—and yet the principal subjects are almost invariably women. He has reduced them to a type, sculpturally rounded in form and classical in their features. In a large number of drawings, these young women are seen at their daily chores, mending nets, carrying children, hauling baskets of fish, or, as in the Clark drawing, walking on a wet and windswept beach.

—Egbert Haverkamp-Begemann, Standish D. Lawder, and Charles W. Talbot, Jr., Drawings from the Clark Art Institute, 2 vols. (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1964), 1:142, no. 340.