Wright exhibited the painting at the Society of Artists exhibition in 1768 and it was re-exhibited before Christian VII of Denmark in September the same year. Viewers remarked that it was "clever and vigorous", while Gustave Flaubert, who saw it on a visit to England in 1865–66, considered it "charmant de naïveté et profondeur". It was popular enough that a mezzotint was engraved from it by Valentine Green which was published by John Boydell on 24 June 1769, and initially sold for 15 shillings. This was reprinted throughout the 18th and 19th centuries, in increasingly weak impressions. Ellis Waterhouse called it "one of the wholly original masterpieces of British art".