Ring Toss is an ingratiating vision of youthful feminine grace in a domestic setting. It signals a remove from the modern urban world and demonstrates White’s ability to find sentiment even in the commonplace. White’s famous picture eked out in a popular pastel shade called terracotta, imitating not only the color and texture of pastels, but the very spatial arrangements and formal informality of Degas’s ballet-dancer pastels. Those were themselves imitations of the off-center snapshot configurations, mixed with a great deal of Japanese woodcut stylizations. Photography was imitating painting which was imitating photography. [1]
Beaton, Cecil, and Gail Buckland. The Magic Image: The Genius of Photography. London: Pavilion, 1989.p. 103
[1] Jussim, Estelle. Visual Communication and the Graphic Arts: Photographic Technologies in the Nineteenth Century. New York: Bowker, 1983.
White, Clarence H, Elizabeth A. McCauley, and Peter C. Bunnell. Clarence H. White and His World: The Art Et Craft of Photography, 1895-1925. , 2017. P. 61