Young Pilgrim Girl

Alexis Grimou made a specialty of a costume that was in fashion in early 18th-century France: the pilgrim's outfit, with its wide hat, cape and staff. Wealthy Parisians liked to be painted, or to imagine themselves, dressed as pilgrims, and Grimou turned out a whole run of these figures. This one is a young girl in the part, painted around 1723. He worked in warm shadow and thick, glowing light, borrowed so admiringly from Dutch painting that his contemporaries nicknamed him the French Rembrandt. The result sits somewhere between a real portrait and a study in dressing up. It hangs today in the Uffizi in Florence.