Hugues Merle

Hugues Merle painted sentimental and moral scenes, mothers with children, young women, beggars, so close in subject and manner to William-Adolphe Bouguereau, the star of the Paris Salon, that contemporaries saw him as Bouguereau's rival. The two were introduced by the dealer Paul Durand-Ruel, who began buying Merle's work in 1862.

Merle came from La Sône, a village in the Isère, trained under Léon Cogniet and exhibited at the Salon from 1847. His Beggar Woman in the Musée d'Orsay dates from 1861, the same year he finished The Scarlet Letter for an American collector, William Walters of Baltimore. It shows Hester Prynne holding her daughter Pearl, and Nathaniel Hawthorne, who knew the picture only from a photograph, thought it the finest illustration of his novel.