When this small painting on wood was bequeathed to the National Gallery it had the title Vespers, although it had previously been titled Young Girl with Flowers when listed with a Paris dealer in 1900.
The composition is very similar to a picture titled Sunday Afternoon (Zondagmiddag), which Jacob Maris had painted a few years earlier, in 1863. Formerly in the William Van Horne Collection in Montreal, that painting’s current location is unknown, but a lithograph of it was made by Frederik Weissenbruch. This shows a girl, who is slightly older, seated outside an ivy-covered house. A church spire can also be seen in the distance on the left. However, the girl in Sunday Afternoon is knitting, and her dress is of finer quality.
In this picture, painted in 1867, Maris has replaced the knitting with a rather worn straw hat, which the girl is decorating with flowers. She is also wearing jewellery (a necklace and earrings) – perhaps because of a visit to the church. The same girl may have posed for A Girl feeding a Bird in a Cage, which was painted in the same year. The church itself is in Montigny-sur-Loing, a small town on the southern edge of the forest at Fontainebleau, some 50 miles south of Paris. It also appears in View of Montigny-sur-Loing (Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen, Rotterdam), which Maris painted in 1870.
Maris reused many of the features in both pictures in another painting, Girl-Knitting on a Balcony, Montmartre (Gemeentemuseum, The Hague), painted two years later in 1869. This painting returns to the earlier image of a girl (seen in profile) knitting, but also includes a straw hat, which has been placed on the ground.
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