In the early years of the twentieth century, American Impressionist Jane Peterson rose from modest beginnings to become a critically acclaimed artist. Her distinctive impressionist style is marked by an interest in broad areas of color, light and shadow, and capturing spontaneous movement. Born in Elgin, Illinois, Peterson was the second daughter of a watchmaker for the Elgin Watch Company and a homemaker. Showing an early talent for art, she was admitted to the Pratt Institute of Brooklyn. In 1895 she traveled to New York City to take up her studies there with $300 in her pocket borrowed from her mother. Peterson paid for her classes and supported herself by giving private art lessons. At Pratt, Peterson studied under a new instructor, Arthur Wesley Dow, whose teaching method and spirit allowed his students the freedom to develop their own individual styles.

After completing her studies at Pratt, Peterson went on to study painting at the Art Students League under Frank Vincent DuMond. She left for Europe in 1907, visiting London, Paris, and Venice. It was in Venice that she met Joaquìn Sorolla y Bastida, the artist who likely had the most profound influence on her art. Sorolla agreed to take her on as a student and in the summer of 1909, Peterson arrived in Madrid for six months of study with the Spanish master. Under his influence, her work at this time took on a new brilliance of color. In 1910, Peterson left Madrid and headed for Egypt and Algiers, energized to take her work in a new direction.

Peterson continued to travel extensively throughout the next few years, visiting Paris (1912), the American Southwest (1915), Canada and Alaska, and New England (1916). From 1913 to 1919, she held a teaching position at the Art Students League in New York, roughly coinciding with the years of the First World War, when she was unable to travel abroad. It was during this period that the present work was painted.

Executed around 1916, The White Boat, Edgartown displays the striking color and bold line that is characteristic of Peterson's unique painting style. Her scenes of beachgoers and strollers along a pier done during her stays at Gloucester and, as in this work, Edgartown on Martha's Vineyard, "figure prominently during this period, exquisitely capturing Americans on holiday" (P.J. Pierce, Jane Peterson: An American Artist, p. 32). By 1916, Peterson's unique painting style had been firmly developed. Using broad brush strokes and bold lines, Peterson creates a tapestry of highly expressive tones of blue, red, lavender, and yellow, with bright summer sunlight suggested by the glowing white of the bare sheet on which the work is painted.