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The two paintings, The Camera Obscura and Soap Bubbles, were painted for the Prussian imperial family in Berlin. In both paintings, three children appear in a trompe-l'oeil oval window in a painted stone wall. Each figure appears at a different height, but the three are tightly clustered to form a pyramidal composition. With rapt attention that connects them psychologically, the children observe their toys or games.
Amédée drew upon a variety of sources for his paintings of Children's pastimes. From the seventeenth-century Dutch genre painters like Caspar Netscher and Gerrit Dou, popular with eighteenth-century French collectors and engravers, he took both the subject of a boy blowing bubbles and the structure of the fictive window through which we see him.
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