Bida was known for Orientalist genre scenes derived from his extensive travels to Turkey, Syria, Palestine, and Lebanon. He also made etchings with religious themes and biblical narratives. Diverse writers and artists admired Bida for his talent as a draftsman and the detailed accuracy of his reportage from the sites and cultures he studied. Almost all of Bida’s works stress the interaction of a few characters. Many are exercises in light and shadow, like this one, with its subtly rendered tones of gray. In the early 1860s, the artist made a fourth and final trip to the Near East with a view to illustrating the Bible. He traveled to the Holy Land, where he met Ernest Renan (1823–1892), the celebrated French historian, philosopher and author of the Life of Jesus. Bida’s drawings accompanied an 1873 French edition of the Gospels published in two volumes, and several of his works were later used to illustrate French and English editions of the Bible.