This second article considering the reading of knitting and crochet in paintings concludes with its most frequent use, as a sign of the peasant and poverty. This first became prominent in the social realist paintings of the mid-nineteenth century, starting with those of Jean-François Millet.

Millet’s pastel of The Knitting Shepherdess (1856-57) continued his established pastoral theme, showing a young woman engaged in knitting as her flock grazed in broken woodland behind her. In common with other occupations that left the hands free, shepherdesses commonly knitted for their family while they were at work.

A few years later, Millet revisited the theme in his Young Girl Watching her Sheep from about 1860-62. She is knitting in the round with several needles, to produce a long stocking or sleeve.

Young Girl Knitting (1860) is the second painting Jules Breton made of a young woman from his home village of Courrières knitting indoors. Many of his more intimate works like this were sold to private collectors and have never been exhibited.

Breton’s A Peasant Girl Knitting (c 1870) was probably started, if not completed, en plein air in an old orchard near Douarnenez, where the artist and his family often spent their summers. Note that she’s not even wearing clogs, but her feet are bare.

LA Ring’s Smallholders in the village of Ring from 1887 shows a working class couple who lived in the artist’s home village. ‘Polish Niels’ made his living as the village plumber, and supplemented those earnings by selling seeds. He is here making paper bags in which to sell his seeds, as his wife is engaged in knitting, once again in the round.

The Canadian artist Clarence Gagnon’s Brittany Goose Girl from 1908 walks along in her wooden clogs quietly knitting in the golden sunlight of autumn.

When the American painter Winslow Homer lived in the fishing village of Cullercoats on the north-east coast of England in the early 1880s, much of his time was spent painting among the fishlasses and fishwives while their menfolk were at sea. During that time, the women continued with their supporting tasks of knitting and repairing clothing, and repairing nets and gear, as in his charcoal and chalk drawing of Fisher Girls on Shore, Tynemouth from 1884. Rather than wearing wooden clogs, these two have working boots.

One of Henry Herbert La Thangue’s earliest major paintings is this view of The Boat Builder’s Yard, Cancale, Brittany painted in 1881, when he was staying on the Brittany coast. The young Breton woman shown appears out of place, with her working dress, clogs and knitting. She’s surrounded by the tools of and shavings from boat-building in wood. Behind her is the frame of a part-constructed fishing boat similar to those seen in the background at the right, a working boat known as a chaloupe thonière.

These two articles are dedicated to my editor-in-chief, the most prolific knitter I have known, my wife, in thanks for all her support, and technical advice.