A Beggar Woman

A girl stands in a darkening street and looks straight out at us, one hand pressed to her chest, a tear on her cheek, her pale blouse slipping from one shoulder. Behind her rise steep roofs and the spire of a Gothic church against an evening sky. Merle stops the figure above the legs, so almost everything rests on her face and hands. He showed the canvas at the Paris Salon of 1861, and the French State bought it from him that year for the Musée du Luxembourg, the museum of living artists. In 1886, five years after the painter's death, it passed to the Louvre. From 1889 it spent almost 40 years at the château of Fontainebleau, then went back to the Louvre in 1928, and it has belonged to the Musée d'Orsay since 1981.