About this work
— Pierre Daura, oil on canvas, 1943–44 *Georgia Museum of Art, University of Georgia*
The painting shows a young girl with long brown braids and a red shirt-dress, her intelligent face lost in the story her mother was reading to pass the time. The composition captures something fundamentally private — not a posed subject performing for the painter, but a child absorbed elsewhere, wholly unaware of being watched. The warm red of Martha's dress anchors the palette and draws the eye immediately to her figure, while the surrounding tones settle into the quieter register of a Virginia farmhouse interior. In Daura's paintings, form largely takes precedence over color — and here that instinct serves the subject perfectly: the girl's posture, the tilt of her head, the texture of those braids carry more emotional weight than any decorative flourish could.
Daura began this portrait of his daughter shortly before Christmas of 1943, finishing on New Year's Day 1944.
The family was living at Tuckaway, a historic Rockbridge County property near Lexington, Virginia , having settled permanently in the state after the upheavals of the Spanish Civil War and World War II. Martha herself didn't want to sit for the portrait; her mother bribed her by promising to read *Ivanhoe* by Walter Scott to her — and it is precisely that reluctant, distracted quality that Daura caught and preserved. In his daughter Martha's own view, the traumatic experiences of the Spanish Civil War and the tragedies of World War II had changed her father's outlook; personal fame ceased to be important. What remained was this — the close observation of a life he loved, rendered with patience and precision.
This is a painting for rooms that reward stillness: a study lined with books, a bedroom where natural light shifts slowly across the walls, a hallway where a single work can hold its own without competition. Daura's reflective character is evident in his pensive, sensitive studies of people — and *Martha at Thirteen* is among the most quietly affecting of them. It speaks to viewers who understand that the most enduring portraits aren't monuments to their subjects, but records of a particular moment of attention — a father watching his daughter read, on the last evening of a difficult year.
