The model for The Daughters of Eve was a girl named Beatrice Stuart, who sat for many artists from the turn of the century onwards, including Dod Proctor, John Singer Sargent, Alfred Munnings and Augustus John. She was the model for the bronze figure of Peace riding a triumphal chariot on the Wellington Memorial at Hyde Park Corner. Dame Laura Knight who, with her husband Harold had often painted Beatrice described her with much affection 'a beautiful young creature...by her grace and poise, as well as by her activity and apparent ease in climbing rocks on the Cornish shore, few people knew her terrible loss.' The loss mentioned by Knight refers to Beatrice's leg, which was amputated a little above the knee when she was seventeen, a loss which did not prevent her from becoming one of the most popular models of her time. Sir Alfred Munnings wrote upon one of his sketches of Beatrice when an album was compiled of drawings of her by various artists 'Most of your portraits are wrong. Some of them only a mess. Lambert has made your fingernails long. But Dicksee's is quite a success'.

The Daughters of Eve was admired at the Royal Academy exhibition of 1925 and sold for £500. Several years later a critic for The Times recalled the picture with admiration; 'Granting the gentleness of the theme and sentiment, it could hardly have been bettered, being perfectly consistent throughout.' (Times, 18 October 1928, p.21). The success of the picture was the lack of artifice in the subject of a modern-day rustic idyll that celebrates the innocence of youth, the maternal tenderness of womanhood and the beauty of the British countryside that the soldiers of the Great War had fought so hard to protect only a few years earlier. As with many of Dicksee's pictures, the painting was based upon a small watercolour of the composition which was exhibited at the British Institution of Watercolour Painters in 1927 and singled out by the art critic for the Times; 'a special word of praise must be given to the epitome of prettiness.' (Times, 24 March 1927, p.12)