Girl Eating Porridge

Reuben Springer was a Cincinnati businessman who, in semi-retirement, travelled often to Europe and brought paintings home with him. He paid for a large part of the city's Music Hall, which opened in 1878, and he helped fund the young Cincinnati Art Museum. When he died in December 1884 he left the museum his pictures, and this canvas, painted in France ten years earlier, was among them. It has been in the museum ever since. The subject is plain. A country girl in a white blouse and dark bodice sits on a wooden stool with an earthenware bowl of porridge in her hands, and turns to look back over her shoulder. When the museum's conservators took off the old yellowed varnish, her face still looked a little grimy. Bouguereau had painted the dirt there himself.