This figure is based on a wharf labourer Daphne Mayo observed from her hotel window during a visit to Paris in January 1938; her sketch survives among her collected papers in the Fryer Library at The University of Queensland. Though modernist in treatment, in its depiction of the dignity of labour, the figure recalls earlier depictions of peasant labourers by the Belgian sculptor Constantin Meunier (1831−1905), which Mayo may also have seen on her travels.