Girl Carrying Water

A woman stands with a bucket in each hand and a well behind her. The Rijksmuseum, which owns the picture, dates it to about 1855 to 1860.

Those were the years Paris was replumbed. Under Haussmann, the engineer Belgrand reached 150 kilometres out of the city to the springs of the Dhuis valley to pipe their water in. The aqueduct filled in August 1865 and Paris was drinking from it by that autumn. None of that reached the hamlets Millet took his subjects from. There, water came out of a shared well and went home in the arms of whoever had been sent for it, several times a day.

The canvas is small, 41 by 33 centimetres. It reached the Rijksmuseum in 1914 from the heirs of a collector in The Hague, and it hangs on loan in the Van Gogh Museum, where Millet counts almost as family. Vincent copied his peasant figures more often than any other painter's.