The nineteenth-century version of home schooling: A Girl Writing by Henriette Browne, the pseudonym of Sophie Bouteillier Desaux (1829-1901), more details of this interesting painter on wikipedia here. And what a touching and memorable painting – the hair swept up exactly as our daughters do nowadays, the pen slightly too large for her hand, the bird flown out of the bird cage and sitting beside her in a charming but not at all kitsch way, the book propped on three other books – it's all familiar and timeless.