A Girl's Morning Toilette

A lady at her toilette was an old subject in European painting, usually a fashionable woman at a dressing table, with a mirror and a maid to help. Michael Neder painted his version in 1836, in a bare room with a plank floor. The girl stands barefoot beside an unmade bed, fastening the laces of a red bodice over her white shift, and looks straight out of the picture. A cat presses against her ankles. A straw hat and two small holy pictures hang on the wall, a birdcage and a lidded tankard sit on the shelf, and her clothes are heaped at the foot of the bed. Behind her stands a spinning wheel with fibre still on the distaff, and higher up hangs a wall clock with long weights on chains.