Nancy Ferguson was a member of the Philadelphia Ten, an all-female group of Philadelphia-based artists who exhibited together from 1917 to 1945. A graduate of the Philadelphia School of Design for Women and the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts, Ferguson often captured everyday moments painted en plein air, as in this impressionistic scene of a bustling street in Provincetown, Massachusetts. Albert Barnes purchased this painting for educational purposes, so that his students could compare it with the works of Maurice Prendergast, another American artist who, like Ferguson, favored vivid color and mosaiclike compositions.