Bessie Potter Vonnoh (1872-1955) was one of the most prolific and popular American sculptors of genre subjects in the first decades of the twentieth century. Her popularity and fame rested on her choice of subject matter, primarily mothers and children at play and in intimate small groupings, rendered in a tender, engaging, and somewhat nostalgic manner that made her sculptures extremely appealing to a broad American public drawn to her wholesome and immediately accessible style. In contrast to the pretentious memorials and elaborate architectural creations of many of her peers working during the same period, Vonnoh, like Mary Cassatt in painting, sculpted works that exuded a sense of delicate domesticity balanced with the simple joys of motherhood.

Born in St. Louis, Missouri, Vonnoh traveled to Chicago around 1890 and apprenticed with Lorado Taft at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. She later became Taft's studio assistant and helped him with sculptures he submitted at the 1893 Columbian Exposition, where she also exhibited some of her own early work. At the fair Vonnoh was fascinated by the small figures of the Russian sculptor Paolo Troubetzkoy, whose intimate scale and observational immediacy more than likely inspired her later varied compositions of mothers and children.

In 1894 Vonnoh rented her first studio, later recalling that she had "left behind me forever the swaddling clothes of art student life and became a professional." She invited her friends to pose, making little statuettes of them just as they dropped in, dressed in all the incongruities of the day. Her approach was a radical rejection of the classical Greek ideals in favor of capturing the everyday beauty of her modern world at the modest sizes she called statuettes. In 1896 she modeled A Young Mother, thought to be one of the first of her mother-and-child compositions. This work received a bronze medal at the Paris Exposition of 1895, and it later shared honorable mentions with Midsummer at the Pan-American Exposition in Buffalo in 1898.

In 1899 Bessie Potter married the painter Robert Vonnoh, and their time together was marked by mutual respect and enthusiastic promotion of each other's work. Her sculptures are held today in the Metropolitan Museum, the Art Institute of Chicago, and other significant American collections.