This scene represents ragpickers sorting through their findings; the woman appears to be holding her cloth sack open while the young girl transfers items to it from her cardboard box; meanwhile, the man to the side counts coins in his hand.
Félicie Julie Engrand, known as Fely, was a French painter, born in Marseille on August 25, 1889 and died in the same city some time after 1983. Daughter of a modest worker, she was born at 89, boulevard Chave. A pupil of the Marseille artist Marius Barret, from 1911 she exhibited still lifes, mainly flowers, at the Salon of French artists of which she became a member in 1928. In 1938, the Musée des Beaux-Arts in Marseille acquired her landscape painting entitled in French “Cassis in stormy weather”. She combined her career as an artist with that of teaching, and still worked very actively in her studio at 12, quai d'Estienne-d'Orves until the 1960s and 1970s. She then retired to rue Marcel-Sembrat, near the Place des Marseillaises, where she died in her nineties.
Sources: Marseillaises, Vingt-six siècles d’histoire, Publ. Édisud., 1999, p. 101; Camard J.-P., Belfort A.-M., Dictionnaire des peintres et sculpteurs provençaux (1880-1950), éd. Bendor, 1974.
Artist: Félicie Engrand (1889-c.1983).
Signed in the lower right corner.
Medium: Watercolour and Indian ink.
Condition: Very good condition.
Dimensions: 50 x 65 cm. / 19 ¾ x 25 ½ in.
Frame: Unframed.
Origin: France.
