Along with her friend Theresa Bernstein, Emma Fordyce MacRae was a member of the Philadelphia 10, a unique, progressive group of women artists who broke the rules of society and art by working and exhibiting together. While experimenting with complex, layered techniques of surface preparations, it is possible that MacRae was influenced by the art of fellow Cape Ann artists Max Kuehne and Charles Prendergast, and their work with gessoed, gilded, and incised textures.