Landscape with a Peasant Watering her Cows

In 1866 a group of Boston painters led by William Morris Hunt, who had worked beside Millet at Barbizon, formed a club named after the painter Washington Allston and began showing pictures in the city. Of the 98 paintings in their first exhibition, 55 were French. Small Barbizon panels like this one, signed Th. Rousseau at the lower left, were exactly what those Bostonians were after. The museum gives it no date and calls it simply a landscape with a peasant woman watering her cows. It belonged to Thomas Gold Appleton, a Boston writer and wit who had studied painting in Paris and in 1870 joined the first board of trustees of the new Museum of Fine Arts. The museum thinks it may be the Scene near Barbizon that was lent to the Allston Club in 1867, the year Rousseau died. Appleton left it to the museum in 1884.