Camille Pissarro, 'The Little Country Maid', 1882

We are in the dining room of a family house, looking down on the scene from a standing position. Things are in flux. An unfinished cup of tea sits on the table in front of us. The chairs are pulled back to allow the maid to sweep the floor. A small child in a highchair looks up while feeding himself.

The painting captures a spontaneous moment in a middle-class French home. Pissarro underlines that sense of spontaneity by framing the scene so that many of the objects and features of the room are cut off at the edges of the painting. Most of the table, part of the little boy’s shoulder and the two loose chairs are cropped from view. Two of the pictures on the wall are only partly visible. We can glimpse just a tiny part of the next room, and the door that opens into it is cut off three-quarters of the way up. The artist has chosen this framing carefully, to avoid the feeling of a formal painting of the interior or a portrait of the maid at work. This approach to composition was pioneered by his friend and fellow Impressionist, Edgar Degas.

The day-to-day homeliness of the scene is made more welcoming by the warm palette of blues, oranges and reddy-browns. Pissarro applied the paint using thousands of tiny brushstrokes. At the same time, he worked in flecks of white and violet as highlights. The combined effect is that the picture seems to shimmer and glow with colour.

Perhaps the sense of domesticity is enhanced by the fact that this is Pissarro’s own family home in Osny, a village on the outskirts of Pontoise, a few miles to the north-west of Paris. Pissarro had recently moved into the house with his wife Julie and their four youngest children. The boy sitting at the table is probably the couple’s fourth son, Ludovic Rodolph. He was three or four years old at the time. He later worked as a painter and wood engraver, under the name Ludovic Rodo. The two pictures on the wall behind the maid are one of Pissarro’s pastels of 1881, and a small Japanese painting on silk.

Pissarro signed and dated this picture 1882 in the top right-hand corner. It was a period when he was becoming especially interested in painting ordinary people going about their daily lives. The following year, he depicted a young woman in The Pork Butcher (Tate, London) at her stall in the local market. Like the country maid, she too is quietly absorbed in her work.