Embroiderers before a Window

Two young women bend over an embroidery frame in front of a tall window, with a heavy curtain drawn across its lower half. Fantin-Latour drew this scene as a young man in Paris in the 1850s, and the two girls are usually identified as his sisters, Nathalie and Marie, at their needlework at home.

40 years later he came back to them in lithography. In the 1890s he made several prints of the embroiderers, and one plate, drawn straight onto the stone in 1898 from a drawing of 1860, was given away to the subscribers of a Paris print magazine, L'Estampe et l'Affiche.

This sheet began as one of those lithographs of his own. He then worked over the printed image in oil paint, and the paper was later mounted on canvas. It is small, about 21 by 32 centimetres, and the museum gives it no date. By 1910 it was in New York with the Kraushaar Galleries, and it stayed with a Boston family, the Spauldings, until it came to the museum by bequest in 1941.