Peasant Girl with a Straw Hat

Camille Pissarro

National Gallery of Art

Shown from the lap up a pale-skinned young girl sits in a grassy landscape in this vertical painting. The girl and surroundings are painted with visible strokes and dashes of mostly vivid greens and blues, which give the scene a soft look. The girl sits angled to our right and she looks off in that direction from heavy-lidded, aqua-colored eyes. She has an oval face, full cheeks, and a round chin. The bridge of her nose is touched with pink, and the shadows under her chin are tinged with green. Her brown hair is mostly covered by a wide-brimmed straw hat tied with a thin brick-red ribbon around the base of the high crown. She wears a sky-blue pinafore over a long-sleeved, collared shirt with vertical light and dark blue stripes. Her hands are folded loosely in her lap. The background is filled with dappled greens and hints of shadow, suggesting filtered sunlight and trees, though the forms are not sharply defined.