Among the largest of McNicoll’s canvases, The Apple Gatherer neither romanticizes nor pities its subject. The central figure has been at her work for a while, as her basket is nearly full and her cheeks are flushed with sunburn. Peasant subjects were popular in the nineteenth century, especially with a middle-class, urban audience that felt nostalgic for the pre-industrial age. Paintings such as this one helped to shape the contemporary understanding that the physical appearance of the body revealed a person’s social class and show that McNicoll was interested in the experience of women beyond the white, bourgeois ideal represented in her other work.