does anyone know who painted this beautiful piece? image up

Really difficult to accredit an image when the commercial "fine" art business is now flooded with thousands of images. You might find it by Googling the image (Google now has an image search feature). I'd enter

girl holding books painting

or variations and see if something comes up.

Thanks for your help - i'll try that!

Tough to find an image like this, Sarah, without trying to narrow things down a bit. To LW's excellent suggestion, you might add searches for French, British, or European, ca. 1900. The style of the picture doesn't look North American. Nor does it look southern European.