Although Ellen Day Hale also produced numerous landscapes and large religious murals, she specialized in impressionist-style figure studies such as June. Like the seventeenth-century Dutch masters whose work she admired, Hale excelled at depicting solitary females in light-filled interiors, absorbed in domestic pursuits.

Here the artist emphasizes the sitter's concentration on her sewing, as she ignores the dazzling landscape beyond the window. Despite Hale's extremely loose brushwork-for example, in the thick areas of white paint behind the sitter's head-we can clearly see the woman's thimble and the quick movements of her needle, glinting in the sunlight.

This canvas was presumably painted in Santa Barbara, California, where Hale lived in 1892-93. The dark back of the chair is contrasted with the bright light that floods in and picks out a few strands of the woman's upswept hair. Hale has taken liberties with the checkered pattern on the woman's dress, flattening it out in certain sections, allowing the right shoulder to appear to dissolve into the light, and adding the unexpected, humanizing touch of a missing button, of which the seamstress seems ironically unaware.