Images of children receiving reading lessons are first found in seventeenth century Holland and neighbouring countries. In the context of the Protestant Reformation and a shift in social values, the ability to read was crucial, as it was through an independent knowledge of the scripture that people gained access to God. Here Victorian era artist Eleanor Bell intentionally evokes these moral concerns through her use of a brownish, recognizably Dutch, palette. The light falling across the young girl’s face and her opened ‘picture Bible’ dramatises the moment of mental illumination, a device also seen in Rembrandt’s Two old men disputing.