Shepherdess Leaning on her Staff

In May 1898 the Worcester Art Museum, in central Massachusetts, opened with its first exhibition, made up of pictures borrowed from collectors and dealers. One of the lenders was Vose Galleries of Boston, a picture business founded in 1841, and among the works it sent was this small canvas, number 151 in the catalogue. Vose had bought it from Hannah Gregerson of Providence. Her brother George had acquired it from the Boston painter William Morris Hunt, who bought it from Millet himself. A shepherdess wrapped in a long dark-blue hooded cloak stands against a grassy bank, both hands folded over the top of her staff and her chin resting on them. Behind her the trees close in, and the sheep are only a faint shape beyond the bank under a cloudy sky. The museum dates the picture to about 1852 or 1853. Vose sold it in 1907 to Robert Dawson Evans and his wife, Maria Antoinette, and it came to the museum with her bequest ten years later. Vose Galleries is still in business in Boston, run by the sixth generation of the same family.