The tradition of painting traders plying their wares out-of-doors in city and country was well-established by 1850, and Smith enhances the familiar subject by adding the specifically nineteenth-century theme of childhood. The expression on the face of the fruitseller, stationed outside the country school door, is well-observed, at once amused and disapproving, but alert to the fact that the mother is reaching into her purse. While in eighteenth-century pictures of similar subjects, the vendor would have been a pretty young woman, here the features of the stall-keeper is contrasted with the youth and attractiveness of her customers.