John George Brown, born in Durham, England, immigrated to the United States and later became America’s most successful painter of children. Most of the children in Brown’s paintings are engaged in a variety of activities. “His specialty was the street urchin, dirty but endearing.”

The Little Servant, c. 1880, exemplifies the idea of the street urchin as dirty but endearing. Here, a female child worker, barefoot, pauses from her housekeeping work to look out the window at the outside world. The dark interior is contrasted with the light shining through the window, perhaps indicative of her own desire to escape from her plight.