Three Little Girls

Three Little Girls comes from Candida Romero’s Little Girls series, a remarkable body of approximately one hundred paintings created between 2003 and 2008. The series originated from a collection of anonymous late Victorian photographs assembled by Pierre-Jean Rémy, the French novelist, diplomat, literary figure, and member of the Académie française. Almost all of the children in these photographs remain unnamed. Their families have been forgotten, their histories dissolved, and what survives are only their faces, gestures, clothing, and expressions, suspended outside biography.

It was precisely this silence surrounding each child that fascinated Rémy and Romero. The original photographs were small nineteenth-century keepsakes, softened by time, with sepia tones, worn edges, and surfaces gently marked by generations of handling. Rather than attempting to recover the factual lives of the girls, Rémy imagined new ones, writing fictional texts that restored a sense of identity, personality, and destiny to children history had left anonymous.

Romero then transformed these photographs and literary fragments into independent pictorial worlds. Her paintings are not illustrations of Rémy’s texts; they are layered acts of reinvention. Across the series, she worked with photography, silkscreen, gesso, acrylic, oil, ink, and, in certain works, antique textiles, lace, paper, and other historical materials. The diversity of materials mirrors the diversity of the imagined narratives themselves, with each painting developing its own atmosphere, surface, and emotional register. The completed series was exhibited in a solo presentation at the Fondation Azzedine Alaïa in Paris.

In Three Little Girls, the faces of three young girls emerge through a luminous field of abstract color and texture. Their presence feels quiet and distant, almost like an image half-remembered, while the surface surrounding them brings the work firmly into the present. Soft greens, yellows, whites, and earthy tones move across the composition with an airy, painterly quality, creating a sense of lightness despite the depth of the work’s history.

I chose Three Little Girls for the Kara Childress Collection because of its extraordinary use of abstract color. In my own design work, I am always thinking about how color can shape the feeling of a room, and this piece has the rare ability to feel both subtle and alive. The greens and yellows are rich without feeling heavy, airy without feeling pale, and they would bring warmth, movement, and sophistication to almost any interior.

What I love most is the way Romero balances timelessness and modernity. The imprint of the three faces gives the work a classical, almost archival quality, while the abstraction around them feels fresh, expressive, and unexpected. There is intrigue in the way the figures appear and recede through the surface, as though the viewer is discovering them slowly over time.

I have admired Candida Romero’s work for years, and Three Little Girls represents so much of what I love about her practice. Her work has a way of making a space feel special, not simply decorated. It brings history, imagination, craftsmanship, and emotion into the room. This is the kind of piece that can live beautifully in a home for generations, becoming not only part of an interior, but part of a family’s own story.