The careful composition shows the youths' healthy bodies in a fresh and modern style, which may be contrasted with the lifeless classical models depicted in contemporary academy paintings, and Tuke's earlier work.

The painting is ambiguous, and can be read in several ways: as a celebration of athletic masculinity; or as a representation of the innocence and purity of youth, unselfconscious in a natural setting, reminiscent of a lost rural idyll; but many discern a homoerotic charge.

Tuke's paintings of naked boys bathing inspired several works by Uranian poets in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, including "The Dawn Nocturne (August Blue)" by Alan Stanley (1894), and the earlier poems "Sonnet on a Picture by Tuke" by Charles Kains Jackson (1889) and "Ballade of Boys Bathing" (1890) by Frederick Rolfe, the self-proclaimed "Baron Corvo".

It was the second of Tuke's works to be purchased by Chantrey Bequest Fund for the Tate, following All Hands to the Pumps in 1889, an uncommon compliment to the artist.

Pictures of naked youths outside of a classical context were not generally acceptable in this period, with a notable exception for depictions of bathing: another prominent example is Thomas Eakins' The Swimming Hole (1884–85).

It is difficult to identify Tuke's models, due to his habit of interchanging heads and bodies in his paintings, but one was Maurice Clift, a nephew of a family friend, who was killed in France in the First World War.