The girl with the guitar

Ribot returned repeatedly to the subject of young female musicians throughout his career, and the version now in Troyes — The Girl with the Guitar — stands within this series as another meditation on absorbed, private music-making. The girl subject allowed him to soften the more austere qualities of his male musician paintings without abandoning his commitment to plainness. French genre painting in the mid-nineteenth century routinely sentimentalized child musicians; Ribot resisted this tendency, presenting the girl as concentrated on the practical matter of playing rather than performing innocence for the viewer. The Musée des Beaux-Arts de Troyes holds several works representative of the Champagne region's collecting tradition, and this Ribot canvas fits comfortably within a preference for solid, well-crafted painting over academic showpieces.

Ribot uses a limited warm palette anchored in browns and ochres, with the guitar's wooden body serving as a middle-value element that connects figure to shadow. His treatment of the girl's clothing is broadly painted to keep attention on face and hands, where the finest modelling occurs.