Richard Rothwell RHA (1800-1868) began his artistic career as a portrait painter in Dublin, Eire. He then moved to London and became studio assistant to Sir Thomas Lawrence, finishing several of Lawrence's works after the his death in 1830. By the early 1840s Rothwell had established a good practice of his own. He travelled several times to Europe and twice to the USA and described himself as having 'the dream of a posthumous fame'.

This painting is a particularly fine example of Rothwell's work in the field of genre painting. Its sentiment and colouring were admired by contemporary audiences but the way in which the boy and girl seem to be playing at begging rather than genuinely driven by necessity is perhaps less appealing to today's viewer. When the image was engraved for the Art Journal in 1872, the accompanying text referred to this ambiguity in the subject matter, a circumstance which may have been intended by the artist.