Manda Lamétrie, Farmwoman

She walks straight toward us, full-length, on a canvas more than two metres tall. Manda Lamétrie, a young farmwoman from Sainte-Marguerite-sur-Mer on the Normandy coast, carries a pail full of milk, her arms bare, her pale apron the brightest thing in the picture, with a cow and the orchard close behind. Roll signed it Roll 87 in the lower corner. At the Salon of 1888 the French state bought it through its service for acquiring work by living artists. The following year it was sent to the Exposition universelle, the world's fair Paris staged for the centenary of the Revolution, the fair of the brand-new Eiffel Tower. A Norman dairy woman stood there at full height among the official art of France. Afterwards the picture went to the Luxembourg, the state's museum of living artists, and in 1929 to the Louvre.