Anna Leafing Through a Portfolio of Prints

The girl peering round the edge of that big sheet is Anna, the artist's seven-year-old stepdaughter. Laura Alma-Tadema painted her in 1874 in London, three years after marrying her father, the painter Lawrence Alma-Tadema, and only a year after she first exhibited her own work. The panel is tiny, barely 11 centimetres high, and she kept colour almost entirely out of it, working in black, whites and ochre like the prints in the portfolio, with just a faint blue pattern on the wallpaper. The print is so large that Anna has to hold it up with both hands, and still only half her face shows. In the lower corner Laura signed and dated it and added Op. VI, taking up her husband's habit of numbering each painting like a piece of music. Anna grew up to become a painter herself.