Oil on canvas (lined), signed and inscribed Paris / Aug, 187? at lower right, presented in a carved wood frame.

Stretcher size 29 x 23 in.; Frame dimensions 35 x 28 1/2 in.

A native New Yorker, Edwin Howland Blashfield received academic training in Europe and America. Blashfield studied in Boston briefly in the mid-1860s before traveling to Paris from 1867 to 1870 and 1874 to 1880, where he studied with Léon Bonnat and Jean-Léon Gérôme. Upon returning to the United States, Blashfield took up residence in the Sherwood Studio Building in New York from 1881-87. Then he left for six more years of travel, which included Egypt, Europe, and England. He spent the summer of 1887 at the artist colony at Broadway, England, and associated with American painters Edwin Austin Abbey, Frederick Leighton, and Lawrence Alma-Tadema.

He rose to prominence at the 1893 Chicago World's Fair Exposition for his mural, The Art of Metal Working. Afterward, Blashfield devoted himself to mural painting, which was experiencing a revival during the American Renaissance. Blashfield's commissions included the dome of the Library of Congress, Detroit Public Library, Union League Club of Chicago, Court House of Baltimore, Cleveland Federal Building, and capitol buildings of Iowa, Wisconsin, and Minnesota. He also did murals for many churches such as the Church of the Ascension in New York City and St. Matthew's Church in Washington D.C. In 1913, Blashfield's book Mural Painting in America was published.

Blashfield was President of the National Academy of Design in New York from 1920 to 1926, a member of the Architectural League of New York, the National Sculpture Society, and the National Society of Mural Painters. He exhibited in the National Academy of Design, Paris Salon, Brooklyn Art Association, Pennsylvania Academy, and the Royal Academy in London.

Canvas has been lined, allover age cracking, several areas of retouching visible under UV light inspection, grime.