Camille Pissarro the Little Country Maid

¶ … Country Maid

Art analysis: The Little Country Maid

The Little Country Maid is a painting by the French Impressionist artist Camille Pissarro. The painting has a seemingly humble subject, and depicts a fairly mundane image. However, in this image, the painter suggests a point-of-view of how the servant class was regarded at the time of the painting's construction in 1882. Servants like the young woman in the picture were regarded as functional items, much like brooms or sweeping pans, rather than as human beings. Pissarro, by using the maid as a subject, gives the woman a dignity that she might not be regarded with in real life, by making her the central subject of his painting.

The painting depicts a young maid sweeping the floor of a room. A small child sits to the right of the gazer. The room seems to be a breakfast room. The table is partially cleared of the breakfast setting. The rest of the family has evidently left for the day, except for the little girl who wears a child's apron. The chairs have been pulled out away from the table so the maid can clean. Evidently, the child belongs to the person who owns the home, as the maid gazes away from the child, without a look of possession. The hazy lighting in the painting suggests morning. The maid is trying to seem unobtrusive as she looks at the floor. She has also been 'made' obtrusive by the maid's clothing she is forced to wear, which is shapeless, dark, and almost of an entirely uniform blue color, except for the faded white stripes of her blouse. Her hair is softly pulled away from her face. Unlike a regal lady, the maid wears a pink kerchief around her neck, to keep her collar from getting dirty and her skirts expose her ankles, so her dress will not get dirty as she cleans.

The maid's drab, functional garb seems to blend in with the darkness of the room. This suggests that the maid to some extent 'is' part of the room she cleans. Her somber clothing and tiny features suggest that the people who own the house see her as one with the room. Her expression is so muted she almost seems to be hiding her true feelings even from the viewer as well as the little girl. The little girl pays the maid no regard, and simply goes on eating. However, to ensure that the viewer's attention is focused upon the lower-class woman, rather than the upper-class girl, the face of the child is very blurry in the swirls of paint upon the canvas. The table itself is also fairly indistinct. The finery of the table or the room exists mostly as hazy colors in the light, and despite the pastel, delicately-colored maid, she is the most sharply featured and important figure in the room, from the perspective of the viewer and the painter.

Pissarro's painting forces the painting's likely upper-class viewer to see the world anew and to give more consideration to the woman than to the other aspects of the room. It is an ideological work, but in a subtle fashion. It does not tell the viewer what to think. Rather, by choosing to subjectively focus upon a particular aspect of human life, it conveys a specific intention and perspective about the world to the viewer. Pissarro often painted working-class women, and some of his other well-known works include The Maidservant, Washerwoman, and A Young Woman Washing Dishes. Pissarro painted the darker side of rural life, unlike his fellow Impressionists who enjoyed showing the beauty of unspoiled nature. "The key theme of domestic labor is linked, in turn, to Pissarro's views on agricultural labor and the market economy" and in domestic servitude in The Little Country Maid.[footnoteRef:1] [1: "Groundbreaking perspective on Camille Pissarro opens at the Legion of Honor this fall," Art Daily, December 12, 2011, http://www.artdaily.com/index.asp?int_sec=11&int_new=51257&int_modo=1]

Pissarro was the lone Impressionist who made domestic workers his central focus, just as much as Degas focused on ballet dancers and Monet upon flowers. Pissarro was described as a political radical during his era, and this is manifest in his depiction of the maid and in his other work. "Scholars have tended to treat Pissarro's politics and his art in two separate categories, often refusing to see the most basic connections between them. This is largely because Pissarro was less a political activist than a social and economic philosopher.[footnoteRef:2]" However, although his work has a clear ideological perspective, it is also characterized by humanism and respect for the subject. The maid is not objectified to make a political point. [2: Ibid.]