Albert Anker's portraits of children and youths, which were painted during the summer months spent in his home village of Ins, play a central role in his work. He created them of his own accord and without a specific commission. The boys and girls would sit patiently in his attic studio as models. Only rarely it is mentioned who is portrayed, which makes it difficult to date the portraits. Some of the models are also sometimes seen later in certain multi-figure genre scenes.
He painted his own children mainly in the metropolitan atmosphere of Paris, where the family lived for a long time during the winter months.

Here he portrayed a girl with dark blonde hair held back by a narrow blue ribbon and brown eyes arched by finely chiselled brows. She is wearing a striped beige doublet over a light-coloured top with opulent sleeves. The muted colouring is in slight contrast to the red- and pink-checkered scarf knotted around her neck, which picks up the colour of her cheeks and lips. Turned diagonally to the left, the child waits patiently for the painter to release her again. Her simple clothes reveal her origin rather from the rural environment. The half-length figure is illuminated by warm light, which makes it stand out even more strongly against the dark background - without any sense of space. Anker has captured the seriousness and shyness of the child, as well as every detail, precisely through his magnificent soft painterly style.

For the 1995 catalogue raisonné, the painting could not be examined because it was in an unknown location. It belonged for a long time to Helene Schiess-Frey[1], whose husband Dr. Carl Wilhelm Schiess (+1929) was once the owner of Schloss Spiez[2]. Helene sold the portrait in 1936 (together with a counterpart - a boy's portrait, catalogue raisonné no. 439) at the auction house Fischer in Lucerne. Since then it has never been exhibited again.

[1]Helene Schiess-Frey and her sister, the artist Marguerite Frey-Surbek, were nieces of Emil Frey (1838-1922, long-time National Councilor from Basel and Federal Councilor from 1891 to 1897), who most probalby knew Albert Anker.

[2] In 1919 he had inherited the property of Schloss Spiez from his grandmother, which consumed vast sums of money in renovation costs. The castle was put up for sale. In 1927, the Schloss Spiez Foundation was established, which was able to purchase the castle in 1929

We are grateful to Dr. Therese Bhattacharya-Stettler for her help researching the work and for this catalogue entry.