Ethel Reed was the most prominent and prolific woman in the American art-poster movement of the 1890s. She designed more than 20 art posters in 1895 and 1896, many of them critically acclaimed and enthusiastically collected. She was among the artists, also including Will Bradley and Edward Penfield, commissioned to produce posters for a fundraising book of the “happiest poems” by the beloved children’s poet, Eugene Field. Field had died suddenly of a heart attack in fall 1895 and the book was intended to contribute to funds for his family and for a monument to him in Lincoln Park, Chicago. Like many of Reed’s posters, this one is focused on a solitary female figure surrounded by flowers and foliage, in this case a young girl sitting in a bed of poppies with one in her hair. Poppies were evidently among Reed’s favored motifs; they appeared in stylized form in 1895 in her first poster for the Boston Sunday Herald behind a reading woman and the same year in her cover design and promotional poster for the book Arabella and Araminta Stories by Gertrude Smith, where they encircle the figures of the twin sisters.