The Little Cook (La Petite cuisinière)

Throughout Oller’s first Paris sojourn, Pierre-Édouard Frère’s small-scale paintings of village children engaged in everyday activities were enormously popular with the city’s middle class. Paintings such as The Little Cook were praised for their truthful observations of the lives of the poor, then a novel focus for painters.

Depictions of schooling, such as The Reprimand, were particularly fashionable after 1850, thanks to France’s renewed interest in educating young children. Oller was also intensely interested in pedagogy; he established art schools in Puerto Rico, published a treatise on geometry and art, and painted portraits of the island’s most influential teachers.