The Skier was illustrated on the cover of the February 1911 “Month End Edition” of The Popular Magazine.  N.C. Wyeth painted a number of covers for the publication, which predominantly featured adventure stories and was issued for nearly 30 years beginning in 1903.  According to Christine Podmaniczky, "this painting was done during a visit by Stimson Wyeth [the artist’s brother, known as Babe], who posed for photographs that the artist then used to draw the figure. ‘I have just completed, and shipped, on the same train with Babe,’ Wyeth wrote, ‘a cover for the Popular. The most striking and strongest I have done in a long time. The Ski Runner is its title’" (N.C. Wyeth: Catalogue Raisonné of Paintings, Chadds Ford, Pennsylvania, 2008, vol. I, p. 211).