This delightful canvas, with its lively brushwork and scintillating play of dappled light and shadow, was painted shortly after Renoir took a second studio at 12, rue Cortot, in Montmartre. Rented in the spring of 1875, the new studio afforded him a large garden—described by his friend and biographer Georges Rivière as being "like a beautiful abandoned park"—which became the setting for a series of plein-air figure studies.

In motif and format these works take their cue from Monet's views of young women in the garden at Argenteuil and show Renoir's shared interest in recording the effects of sunlight as it filters through the foliage onto his fashionably dressed subjects. Admired for her "marvelous head of shining, golden blond hair," as recounted by Rivière, as well as for her punctuality and docility, Nini Lopez, the sitter for this picture, was one of Renoir's favorite models, posing for more than a dozen of his paintings in the mid–1870s. Of these, the present work is most closely related to Young Girl on the Beach of 1875–76 (location unknown), in which Nini, wearing the same pinafore and also seated on a folding wooden chair amid lush greenery, dominates the center of the composition. The two paintings were probably undertaken at the same session.