Pasture with a Goose Girl

Alfred Chauchard made his fortune with the Grands Magasins du Louvre, one of the big Paris department stores, and spent a great deal of it on the landscape and animal painters of the Barbizon generation. This canvas had been through the sale of a collector named Oppenheim in 1877 before it reached him. At his death in 1909 he left his collection to the Louvre, and it arrived together with Millet's The Angelus. Troyon painted it in 1854. Big white clouds fill most of the picture. Under them a girl in a white cap drives her geese across a flat pasture with a switch, a dog watching from the side, two cows standing among the birds and a small church spire on the far horizon. The signature and date are down in the lower left corner.