[3][4] After she had ceased studying with Eakins, Van Buren frequently stayed as a guest in his Mount Vernon Street home, and likely posed for the painting during one of her visits to Philadelphia.

[1] Van Buren's dress contains complex passages, composed in part of broad, brilliant pink forms, and of creased light-colored fabric with floral patterns.

Her body twists "like an overused spring",[1] culminating in the focal point of her head, its anatomical structure exactingly rendered, the broad forehead suggesting the sitter's intellectual presence.

[7]Van Buren was often unwell, and was diagnosed as having neurasthenia;[1] in 1886 she wrote to Eakins's wife Susan: "I have at last discovered that the trouble with me is in my head it is exhausted by worry or something or other..."[1] The portrait seems to indicate as much.

Touching on the picture's melancholy, John Updike referred to the painting when he wrote "Discomfort and a grieving inwardness distinguish the best of his (Eakins's) many portraits.

[10] Miss Amelia Van Buren was only the second portrait of a woman from outside his family that Eakins showed publicly; at neither the Philadelphia prelude to the World's Columbian Exposition nor subsequently in Chicago did it receive much mention in the press.

William Innes Homer has called it "superb', and written that "Such a painting can hold its own against the best work of any of Eakins's contemporaries, no matter what their country of origin.