Much like his American contemporaries Winslow Homer and Eastman Johnson, Brown romanticized country life, depicting nostalgic genre scenes of carefree living among the young. This work, with its pensive, lone figure, captures the tranquility of fishing and recalls Brown's paintings of daydreaming teenagers. The underlying message in Waiting for a Bite may be that every man - or boy - is waiting for something, to be found only by casting a line into the pool of life.
