The little knitters

Albert Anker's The Little Knitters (1875) is among his most characteristic subjects: Swiss village children engaged in domestic tasks that were both economically necessary and morally instructive in nineteenth-century Bernese rural culture. Knitting was taught in Swiss schools and practiced at home as a productive occupation for children, and Anker's affectionate attention to this activity — without sentimentality or condescension — made such paintings enormously popular with collectors who valued his honest engagement with Swiss rural life. The work is held in Winterthur, a center of Swiss bourgeois art collecting.

Anker's brushwork in child subjects is particularly fine and disciplined, with the children's faces rendered with luminous clarity. The warm domestic light falls naturally on the small figures, their concentrated absorption in the task conveying psychological truth without theatrical emphasis.