From the website: “The girl, aged around 9 or 10, is dressed in a brown skirt and apron, and a kind of grey smock with rolled-up sleeves. Around her neck, she wears a whitish neckerchief. The child, with pale skin and reddish hair, has a half-plaited braid that falls down her back. Her gaze is fixed on what she is doing, and her stance has an air of resignation and weariness.
The rest of the painting, from the central part to the far right, has a clear protagonist: the loom. It is probably the ‘back strap’ type, a technical apparatus based on straps and wooden bars, which was a mechanised version of the traditional hand loom. At the bottom of the plate, next to the girl’s skirt, you will notice, embossed, the mechanism’s two large cogwheels that make the loom function.
And lastly, an important detail. In the background of the scene, in semi-darkness, we can make out the figure of a man –probably a foreman– who seems to be in front of another machine. However, his gaze is clearly directed towards the girl, in a watchful attitude. This part of the work is not represented tactilely.
Despite the formal beauty of the painting from an artistic point of view, its subject matter shocks us with the reality it depicts: a testimony to the conditions of child exploitation that contributed to the thriving textile industrialisation of the 19th century.”
