Sloan is best known as an urban realist painter who preferred scenes of everyday life and working class people to formal studio portraiture of well-to-do subjects. But he began his career in 1892 as a commercial illustrator, work that he pursued successfully for over a decade in Philadelphia and New York City.

This lively study of a newspaper vendor, made shortly after he moved to New York, was likely executed for a newspaper or magazine. Whether it was ultimately published is not yet known.