Homer often turned to watercolor when he traveled, including during the period he spent in the fishing village of Cullercoats, England. Originally titled Far Away from Billingsgate, this watercolor was later renamed Mending the Nets after Homer scratched away the scenery behind the two engaged in the title activity. The simplicity of the local lifestyle appealed to his interest and gave him a new selection of genre subjects loosely related to his increasing interest in marine scenes. The high level of detail in the work, especially in the figures' hair and the fishing net, evidences Homer's great skill with the difficult medium. The women wear tattered clothes and are focused on their work, a sharp contrast to Homer's earlier compositions of genteel women often engaged in recreational activities.

It was the style, more than the subject, of Homer's English period that seems to have caught his critics off guard, with one noting in the New York Times, "They are English in method and style. One needs to read the signed named before believing that the maker of those British watercolors is the same who used to rouse the wrath or admiration of the critics by his quaint conceits, his bald oddities, his lovely transcripts of scenes that only he knew how to depict." The historian Nicolas Cikovsky credits the sparsity of style "in order to achieve the effect of figures against a plain, unlocalized background" to the influence of Ancient Greek relief sculpture, crediting this newfound sense of compositional space to the metopes of friezes of the fragments of the Parthenon (also known as the "Elgin Marbles") Homer would have seen at British Museum in London.