She belonged in this garden, in the checker of light and shadow and exotic color, slender like a young bamboo and rounded as a purple passion fruit.

From his very earliest years as an illustrator, N. C. Wyeth was a master colorist, a skill he refined as color printing became more common and more accurate in the first decade of the twentieth century. Even in the late teens, however, the less expensive magazines would print colored paintings in black and white to keep per-issue costs down. It is unclear whether Wyeth knew before beginning the painting that the publisher planned to print the image, which is so dependent in on its palette, in black and white.