Isidore Pils

During his travels around Europe and North Africa, the French genre painter Isidore Pils faithfully recorded the local peasant costumes he encountered. Here he used watercolor to capture the bright green and red accents of this young woman’s ornate attire, the details of which were specific to her village and region. In the 19th century, growing differences in lifestyle and dress between countryside and metropolis fascinated artists and audiences from urban centers such as Paris and London. Responding to this curiosity and nostalgia, Pils and his contemporaries produced both small studies and more elaborate genre scenes of village festivals, agricultural labor, and family life. In creating such works, Pils worked directly with real paupers and peasants, recruiting models from the streets of Paris and the villages he visited.