Like other artists of his generation, Eduardo Viana was forced to leave Paris due to the outbreak of the Great War in 1914. On his return to Portugal, he kept in touch with a group of painters interested in exploring the values of modernism, including Amadeo de Sousa Cardoso and the couple Sonia and Robert Delaunay, who settled in Vila do Conde between 1915 and 1917. While socializing with this small group, the painter frequented local markets and discovered some regional handicraft production, namely the clay figurines and popular cloth dolls, sold in the fairs.

In this painting, Viana captures the visual and emotional atmosphere of the markets of Minho by representing two girls with bundles on their heads, wearing multi-coloured costumes, and carrying on their laps two dolls. One can note a certain play between the title and the theme of the painting, since the reference to fair dolls may simultaneously correspond to the female figures that dominate the scene and the dolls they carry.

Influences of Delaunay can be glimpsed in this painting, both in relation to the theme - the idea of the animated doll recalls works of Russian-Ukrainian iconographic inspiration by Sonia - and to some of the compositional solutions: the palette marked by the contrast of complementary colours, rich and bright, applied in patches that contribute to a certain geometry and flatness of the figures; the deconstructed background, formed by coloured fragments that confer dynamism to the composition; and the suggestion of the orphic discs so characteristic of Simultaneism experiments, subtly referenced in the decorative motif of the yellow skirt.

JB