Woman Sewing

In 1900 Baroness van Lynden-van Pallandt gave the Rijksmuseum the modern French paintings she and her husband had been buying in Paris since about 1860. Dutch public collections held almost nothing of the kind. A Monet of the coast road above Monaco came in with the same gift, catalogued five numbers away from this canvas, at a time when hardly anyone in the Netherlands knew his name. Ribot is the sober company in that group. His interiors are built out of near darkness, the light narrowed down onto a face and a pair of working hands, and here it falls on a seated woman in a headscarf mending a piece of clothing. He left the picture undated, so it can be placed only somewhere across a working life that ran from the 1840s to his death in 1891. Since 1991 it has hung a few minutes' walk from the Rijksmuseum, on loan to the Van Gogh Museum.