La chapelle : Les orphelines

La chapelle: Les orphelines depicts a group of orphaned girls attending chapel — a subject that placed Fernand Pelez firmly in the tradition of Social Realist painting that documented the lives of society's most vulnerable members. Pelez had built his reputation on large-scale works depicting street children, circus performers, and the urban poor, and this smaller canvas of orphaned girls in religious ceremony continues that sustained engagement with figures on the margins of bourgeois Parisian society. The chapel setting lends the scene a muted solemnity, the girls' institutional uniformity contrasting with the religious space's aspiration toward transcendence. The Petit Palais, home to the City of Paris's permanent collection, holds this as part of its significant holdings of late nineteenth-century social painting.

Pelez renders the orphaned girls with a realist's attention to their institutional sameness — identical dress, identical postures — while giving each face enough individuality to resist becoming a generalized type. The chapel's architectural setting is kept deliberately simple, placing the emphasis on the human figures rather than the space they inhabit.