Knitting Lesson

In 1853 Martin Brimmer came home to Boston from Europe, 24 years old and heir to a family fortune, and the Boston Athenaeum, the city's subscription library and picture gallery, made him one of its trustees. Two years later the Athenaeum held its 28th exhibition, and Brimmer lent it this canvas, painted only a year or so before. The catalogue called it simply An Interior. A mother sits by a window teaching her daughter to knit. She rests her chin on the girl's bonnet and reaches round her to guide both small hands on the needles. Light from the window falls on a basket of yarn on the sill and on a pile of folded linen on the chest behind them, and a pair of scissors lies dropped on the floor at their feet. Millet and Catherine Lemaire had six daughters, and the Boston museum thinks his own family may have posed for it.