Eva Bonnier was one of many Swedish women artists who studied and worked in Paris in the 1880s. This painting shows a corner of the studio she rented in Montparnasse in 1885–1887. A boy’s head in clay is on the modeling stand. Bonnier was active mainly as a portrait painter. She herself has said that she made the sculpture when she needed a change from painting. The model was described in a letter home as “a little urchin, and therefore not inclined to sit still, but from an Italian family of models”.