On the right, on a snow-covered ground, a woman wrapped in a large red-brown coat and clutching a bundle against her, walks cautiously, eyes downcast, alone in the street. On the left, another woman in a black coat with her children has her back to her.

A newsagent at the back of the composition, a sandwich man on the far right and rows of human figures and tree trunks complete the upper part of the canvas in dark colours, like a circular backdrop surrounding the figures in the foreground.

The light is low. Only the disproportionate shadows of the passers-by, which stand out against the bright light of the ground, accompany the woman’s difficult walk in another direction.

This poignant vision of loneliness, painted in vertical bands with three dominant colours, black, white and reddish-brown, is a painting from her youth, painted at the Ecole des Beaux-Arts, where the treatment of light is already part of the artist’s pictorial work.

Even with caricatured faces, one feels the emotion of a young 21-year-old artist facing the isolation of an old woman, alone and destitute, at a time when the economic crisis of 1929 hit the most fragile.