Eulalie Minfred Banks (1895-1999) was a popular and very prolific illustrator of over fifty children's books. By the age of twelve she was designing Christmas cards for friends and at fourteen she illustrated the children's page of a women's magazine. She published her first picture book, Bobby in Bubbleland, in 1913; her best-loved book is The Bumper Book (1946) which was reprinted frequently.

As 'Eulalie', she illustrated out-of-copyright nursery rhymes, fairy tales and folk tales as well as several children's classics, including Helen Bannerman's The Story of Little Black Sambo (1926) and Robert Louis Stevenson's A Child's Garden of Verses (1929). To make ends meet she also illustrated ABC books, counting books, magazines, calendars and greetings cards, of which this pencil and watercolour design is an example. Eulalie was also a muralist, designing interiors in the houses of the actors Harold Lloyd and Charlie Chaplin in the 1930s.

In 1916, Eulalie married Arthur Wilson, a captain in the RAF Expeditionary Force. The couple moved to Canada in 1918 and then to the United States. Following her divorce, she returned to Britain in 1937 with her daughter but eventually returned to California where she died on 12 November 1999 at the age of 104.

This design includes a golliwog, alongside other toys. The original golliwog was a central character in a series of books by Bertha and Florence Upton published between 1895 and 1909. The doll the character was based on was influenced by the Blackface performance tradition, and as such evolved from a performance tradition grounded in racism. While from the late 19th century until the 1960s the golliwog flourished as a toy, its popularity began to wane in the 1970s as many British people felt that it promoted racial stereotypes.