Portrait of Jeanne Pissarro, Called Minette

In September 1870 Prussian troops occupied Pissarro's house at Louveciennes, outside Paris. When he got back the following summer, about 40 canvases were left out of 20 years of work. This portrait belongs to the years of starting again. By 1872 the family had settled at Pontoise on the Oise, and the child he painted more often than any of his others was his second daughter, Jeanne-Rachel, called Minette at home. That year he made several deliberately posed pictures of her, this one among them, which was unusual for a painter who normally put his children into fields and farmyards. Minette died at Pontoise on 6 April 1874, weeks short of her ninth birthday, nine days before the first Impressionist exhibition opened in Paris with her father among its organisers.