What a lovely title: Little Heathland Princess. Heathland is a wide-open landscape of infertile, acidy soil — a scrubland of low growing, woody vegetation, grasses and scattered trees. We're right there aren't we, in the midst of these native plants and grasses. The little girl even has a long, bent strand of yellowed grass in her mouth!
Fritz von Uhde paints children as they really are. He never romanticizes them. This little girl is standing at the bottom of a hill or berm. The plants around her in the foreground are painted in great detail. The horizon is high up and fading off.
She's a poor girl. Years ago she might have been called a waif — a homeless, neglected or abandoned person, someone who is helpless, who suffers hardship. Is that distant, hazy building we see through the plants where she lives? Does it perhaps suggest how distant or disconnected she is from family or relationships in general? Her large, bare feet are dirty; her hair is not brushed. Her dress is pitifully faded and clumsily patched with black thread. The original sleeves have been torn off.
One observer said that the girl is staring out at us defiantly. I wouldn't say that. I'd say she has a lot on her mind as she looks out at us who are a little beneath her at the bottom of the rise.
Her hands are not boldly on her hips but hidden behind her back. Is she hiding something? Has someone bullied or been mean to her? We might think, "Oh, she is so carefree." I don't think so. We might imagine her inner life is as tangled as the grasses and flowers around her. Over her shoulder on the right side and coming out on an angle, is a tall, dark-leaved thistle. Thistles are symbols of suffering.
All around the world there are suffering children. Some are near; others faraway. There are the children of divorce or where there is domestic violence or addiction. The children who find school to be a taxing struggle. Children who are friendless or kept on the margins by classmates. There are the children who suffer for the sins of war. Insane men make wars and children suffer and die. I want my heart to be sensitized to them. Is that possible — to hold them all in my heart?
Notice that the artist has called her a princess. If indeed she is a waif — someone for whom life is all loss, she is seen to be precious, at least by the artist.
