English School, Girl Crossing a Stream, 19th Century

Barefoot country children at streams and stiles were a stock subject of Victorian genre painting, made for the middle-class market by everyone from Academicians to provincial hands. This unsigned example is by a provincial hand.

A girl in a cream bonnet, yellow blouse and pink skirt picks her way across a rocky stream, her striped apron gathered in one hand. Ferns and heather crowd the bank to the right, and a hillside rises behind her into a hazy sky. The handling is naive, with care taken over the patterned blouse and the ripples round her feet.

Oil on canvas, unsigned. The surface shows pronounced craquelure, with some lifting in the upper right and small paint losses near the lower right corner. In a later gilt frame with a swept acanthus moulding and a gilt slip.