Vallayer-Coster joined the Académie Royale in 1770 as a painter of still life, the genre considered most suitable to women artists in eighteenth-century Europe and the lowest of the Academy’s hierarchy of genres. Vallayer-Coster enjoyed favorable critical opinion throughout her career, as well as the patronage of Queen Marie Antoinette (1755–1793) before the Revolution and Empress Josephine (1763–1814) after. This painting was probably among the four still lifes and two portraits that Vallayer-Coster showed at the Salon of 1781.