[Kitty Stieglitz]

Alfred Stieglitz made this portrait of his eight-year-old daughter Katherine (Kitty) while on vacation in Europe. Shortly before he arrived in Paris with his family in the summer of 1907, Auguste and Louis Lumière had announced their invention of the autochrome color process. Stieglitz was eager to try it, using his family as his first models. Since her infancy, Stieglitz had frequently photographed Kitty; in 1900 he exhibited a series of studies of her under the title Photographic Journal of a Baby. This image continued that visual investigation . Here Kitty sits on a park bench, clutching a bouquet of vibrant purple blossoms in one hand and holding a butterfly net in the other, as though her father had caught her taking a break from an afternoon of outdoor frolic.