Knitting Lesson

By 1860 this small panel belonged to Narcisse Diaz de la Peña, a fellow painter whose forest scenes and nymphs sold well in Paris. He and Millet had known each other since the mid-1840s, when both were young painters in the capital, and Diaz was among the friends who later worked in and around Barbizon. A mother sits on a straw-bottomed chair in a plain room with a red tiled floor, her small daughter on her lap. She reaches both arms around the child and guides the small hands on the needles. The girl, in a blue dress and a pink cap, looks down at a reddish strip of knitting. Behind them a pile of folded linen and a copper jug stand on a dresser, a white cat lies on the floor, and loose ends of yarn are scattered at the mother's feet. Millet came back to this lesson between mother and daughter several times over the years, in paint and in drawing. This version is oil on a wooden panel, about 40 centimetres high.