The vase "The Orphan" ("Sigutė")

The idea to depict the story of the orphan Sigutė was proposed to Filomena Ušinskaitė (1921–2003) in about 1947 by  editors at the Children’s Literature Division of the State Fiction Publishing House, which at that time was in Kaunas. They commissioned an illustration to a poem by Salomėja Nėris based on a Lithuanian folk tale. The unfortunate fate of the orphan Sigutė produced deep reverberations in the artist’s mind. After more than a decade, Ušinskaitė again took up the theme of the orphan who was loathed by her stepmother, but loved dearly by farm animals, and transferred the now older Sigutė from the children’s book to the surface of a glass vase. Both the vase and the sketch for it are in the collection. In the sketch, a long-haired teenage girl sits in a meadow full of flowers, with her faithful friends, a cow and a dog, beside her.

The idea to depict the story of the orphan Sigutė was proposed to Filomena