The Little Country Maid is an 1882 Impressionist painting by French artist Camille Pissarro. It depicts a scene whereby a young maid sweeps a bourgeois country house, with a young child seated to her right.
The house, however, is not that of the increasingly wealthy middle class at the time – this is likely Pissarro’s own house in Osny, North-Western Paris.
In the 1880s Pissarro was not a wealthy man, still, a struggling artist living in relative poverty. The art we can see on the wall is his own, and the girl that we see sweeping the floor of the room taking up the bulk of the canvas is actually his nineteen-year-old niece Nini who is very likely working for free. The little child is Pissarro’s fifth child Ludovic-Rodolphe. Camille Pissarro would not achieve wealth until his 60s.
Camille Pissarro’s The Little Country Maid was donated to the Tate Museum in London by the artist’s son Lucien in 1944 and is currently on display in the National Gallery in London.