Stott’s early years in France were marked by the rise of Naturalism and Impressionism – exemplified in the work of the recently deceased Jean-François Millet, the newly popular Naturalism of Jules Bastien-Lepage and the peasant paintings of the Impressionist Camille Pissarro. It was painted in the important artists’ colony at Grez-sur-Loing, where it had an immense influence upon American, Scandinavian and British students.

Cut off by the recently constructed Loing canal, Grez was a neglected picturesque backwater. Its river, although clogged with weeds, provided ample opportunities for swimming and boating. Its banks bordered the Forest of Fontainebleau and an area of swamp known as the ‘fairy marsh’ that inspired the musings of the more literary members of the group, chief amongst whom was Robert Louis Stevenson. Stott was only too willing to follow Stevenson’s advice and “make haste” to the village, “walk in the great air … wait upon the moods of nature” and while not “picking and botanizing” to experience “the incommunicable thrill of things”.

Stott studied his model for La Tricoteuse in full sunlight. Under foliage, the flickering conditions permitted no possibility of a patient build-up of tones and one was compelled to work quickly and look for an ‘impression’. It was hugely successful: “A young peasant girl [in] a sun-spotted world”, was how Alice Corkran described the painting. The setting was “a corner filled with a tangle of waterside blossoms, bordered with straight stemmed silver birch trees, through thefoliage of which rains the sunlight … knitting as she walks. She is part of the freshness and pleasantness, a note in the impression of sunlight and flower, of cool water and of the innocent active life of nature.”

Knitting – le tricot – was a contemplative activity given over to moments of reverie. In the hands of Millet, knitting became almost heroic. It was one of his most popular subjects, issued as a facsimile etching in 1881 by The Fine Art Society, and recalled La Grande Bergère of 1864 (Musée d’Orsay, Paris), one of his most famous pictures. He referred particularly to the treatment of the mound overgrown with saplings against which the figure is posed, concluding that the composition “is one of stillness and heat and solitude, and the pathos of an unalterable patience”. Stott may well have been aiming for such qualities. Freshness, formalism, and sensitive handling of sunlight, shade and spatial recession, all contribute to a huge aesthetic appeal of La Tricoteuse, while girlhood, innocence, the slow-moving stream and thin saplings instantly implied a sentiment that transcended their factual record.