Maternal Precaution

The title is a polite one. On the doorstep of a stone cottage, two steps above the yard, a peasant mother bends over her small child and holds its dress up out of the way so it can relieve itself outside. An older girl in a bonnet leans against the door frame and watches. A spade stands against the wall at the right, and the child has dropped its little basket on the ground. Millet had settled at Barbizon in 1849 with Catherine Lemaire, and they would have nine children. Beside his field workers he kept painting the daily business of minding small ones. The Louvre dates this only to the third quarter of the century. The panel is 29 centimetres high, and in 2016 it was shown at the Musée Marmottan Monet in Paris, in an exhibition on the child in French painting.